If one day the history of the Ukraine war is written, the description of Moscow's misjudgments before the attack on February 24 should take up a lot of space.

Russian journalists are already trying to shed light on this aspect - from abroad, because their work at home has become impossible.

President Vladimir Putin was sure of victory, Roman Anin from the investigative portal "Vashnye Istorii" (Important Stories) quoted one of his interlocutors in a research published on Monday, "because we finished Georgia in 2008 in a week, Crimea in 2014 without one shot and also got along quite easily in Syria.

And then, in 2022, everyone is reporting that we will be awaited with flowers in Ukraine.

So we started.”

Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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Anin used to do research for Novaya Gazeta, and his own project has existed since 2020. Since August 2021 he, several of his colleagues and the publishing company of Vashnyje Istorii, which is registered in Latvia, have been considered "foreign agents", and the medium has also been since the beginning of March as an "undesirable organization".

This is a de facto ban on activity, because any collaboration or assistance is prohibited under severe penalties.

Also, the Istories.media website is now blocked in Russia for alleged misinformation about the war.

It is all the more remarkable that Anin and his colleagues were able to talk to around ten sources in the secret services and in Putin's apparatus about the president's decision, as the editor-in-chief of "Vashnyje Istoriii" of the FAZ reports - who is no longer in Russia himself.

The interlocutors all had the "special wish" to do so: They were "very angry" about what happened, the "stupidity" and "unprofessionalism" of the procedure.

"Putin, the least informed man"

According to Anin, all sources agreed that the Russian leadership assumed that its own army would not encounter any serious resistance in Ukraine.

"The task was given like this: take Mariupol in three days, Kyiv in five," said a secret service official.

Apparently, after rapid military successes in Ukraine, the focus was on taking action against the remaining dissatisfied with units of the special police and the national guard.

The mobile arrest buses, familiar to anyone who has seen an illegal protest in Russia, were already there.

"You've seen the pictures of burned-out arrest buses, haven't you?

They really believed that they would take everything quickly and then disperse the crowd with batons," Anin quoted a special forces officer as saying.

The decision,

A Kremlin official reported that Russia's president only saw the corona pandemic, if at all, as an "inner circle".

That made the work very difficult.

In Putin's isolation, according to Anin, it has become almost impossible to convey alternative points of view to the president that do not agree with those of the secret services.

That is why Putin relied primarily on the so-called Fifth Service, which is responsible for "operational information and international connections" in the FSB secret service.

This was reported by some Russian media, above all the secret service experts Andrei Soldierov and Irina Borogan, soon after the attack and added that the leadership of the Fifth Service around its head, Sergei Beseda, was placed under house arrest and later taken into custody.