Intelligence & the Russo-Ukrainian war: introduction to the special issue

On 24 February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, having amassed some 150,000 troops along its border, launching a war of territorial conquest that seemed a throwback to the European experience of war in the 1940s while at the same time ushering in a new era in European security. From an intelligence perspective, the war has involved a coalescence of traditional intelligence aims alongside innovative means of realising them, and of traditional participants in the shadow war alongside ‘citizen spies’, making use of social media and other forms of open source intelligence (OSINT) to monitor, record, and report on developments, as well as to counter misinformation in the digital sphere, in what was soon termed ‘the world’s first TikTok war’.¹ It is in this context that this special issue has been prepared, to coincide with the second anniversary of the February 2022 Russian military invasion. It brings together a range of contributors and perspectives to provide analyses of the roles, performance, and lessons of intelligence in relation to the Russo-Ukrainian war. It is divided into three sections, developing the main intelligence themes to have emerged from the war.

The first of these focuses on Anticipations and Warnings. It opens with an article by Sir David Omand, former Director of GCHQ and UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, on the continuing challenge for Western intelligence that Vladimir Putin’s Russia has represented. In this article, Omand emphasises continuities with the Soviet era and shows how the SEES model (Situational awareness, Explanation, Estimation, and Strategic notice) that he first set out in How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence can be applied to analytical thinking in relation to this challenge.²

The following three articles in this section address the issue of the effectiveness of intelligence in providing warning of an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine. The complexities of warning intelligence and issues in its provision are addressed thoroughly in the article by Kristian Gustafson, Dan Lomas, and Steven Wagner, who see this case as one of overall warning intelligence success. Their analysis also recognises some variation in western intelligence warning, and this is explored further in case studies of Germany by Eva Michaels, focusing on the contribution of external experts in anticipating, and warning of, the Russian invasion, and of Swedish intelligence, by Michael Jonsson. Across these three articles, a nuanced picture emerges regarding the assessment and communication of the risk of a Russian military invasion and policymaker receptivity to this risk.

There was certainly more than one western understanding of the answer to the key question of whether Putin intended to launch a military invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, as opposed to the question of whether Russia had the capabilities required to do this. As Liz Truss, the British Foreign Secretary at the time of the February 2022 Russian invasion, recalled of the annual Munich Security Conference, held just days before the invasion occurred: ‘Both the Germans and the French were less convinced that there was definitely something going to happen, so there was a lot of debate about whether the Russians were really going to do this, whether this was sabre-rattling, could there be some kind of discussion’.³

Some of this division over the difference between Russian capabilities and intent may well have reflected the level of investment, including political investment, that several European states had made in bringing Putin’s Russia into the western fold and a consequent reluctance to believe that he would jeopardise Russia’s progress towards ever deeper ties with its European and Scandinavian neighbours by invading Ukraine. The former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recalled: ‘There was this atmosphere of unreality because all the intelligence said it was going to happen, all the intelligence said that the Russians were about to invade, but some of our closest European friends were still very much invested in all the diplomacy that they had been doing’.⁴ As an unnamed German official told the Financial Times: ‘Germany’s intelligence assessment is the same as the US and UK one. The Russians have everything in place for an invasion. But the question is: how do you interpret this information? The US and UK assume he’s going to act. But we see it slightly differently’.⁵

To an extent, this dilemma was also present in the case of France. Here, the dismissal of General Eric Vidaud, the head of the Direction du Renseignement Militaire (DRM), shortly after the Russian invasion, on the grounds of ‘insufficient briefings’ and a ‘lack of mastery of the issues within his remit’, suggested an intelligence failure.⁶ However, the fact that General Vidaud was nominated in that position only seven months prior, suggests this failure alone is unlikely to have been the sole reason for his departure.⁷

One possible explanation for this apparent failure would be that the French intelligence community had most, if not all, the information it needed, but made the wrong assessment of Russian intentions. In an interview with French daily Le Monde, Chief of the Defence Staff General Thierry Burkhard explained: ‘The launch of the attack came as no surprise … The previous evening, allies had shared precise information’. But, at the same time, he acknowledged an analytic divergence between the French community and its anglophone allies: ‘The Americans said the Russians were going to attack, and they were right. Our services thought that conquering Ukraine would be monstrously expensive, and that the Russians had other options’.⁸ A generous critique might be that French analysts were wrong for the right reasons⁹ (it did not make sense from a Western liberal democratic perspective). An unnamed senior official explained, ‘the hypothesis of an invasion was never excluded but it did not seem to be the most likely’.¹⁰ A less generous critique would be that French intelligence failed to understand the strength of Vladimir Putin’s nationalist and imperialist fervour, and miscalculated Russia’s intentions.¹¹

Some observers have gone further and argued that French officials adopted a particularly prudent or sceptical approach toward their anglophone allies due to the experience of the lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003. From this perspective, French officials lacked trust in American and British assessments because they had wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein was pursuing a Weapons of Mass Destruction programme, a claim that was used to justify going to war in Iraq. However, most of the senior officials in charge in 2022 were far removed from power at the time of the Iraq debacle and would only have had a distant understanding of the episode. For those who were there, the intervening twenty years provided ample evidence that France could rely on robust American and British intelligence capabilities in the struggle against terrorism.¹²

One distinctive feature of American and British intelligence in the pre-invasion period was that it was used publicly as ‘pre-emptive intelligence’ designed to undermine the pretexts for the invasion that were offered by Putin and, ultimately, to dissuade him from going any further down the path to war, a process that several of the contributions to this volume discuss. CIA Director William Burns played key roles in this pre-invasion period, his background as a Russian-speaking former US Ambassador to Moscow giving him important insights into Putin’s thinking. (In 2008, when Burns was the US Ambassador to Russia, Putin had told him: ‘Don’t you know that Ukraine is not even a real country?’¹³) Burns was involved in intelligence-led pre-emptive diplomacy, travelling to Moscow to meet with Putin in November 2021, as Russia began to move troops towards the Ukraine border, to convey the message that his plans were known.¹⁴ Prior to this the Biden Administration had begun to share intelligence on Russian plans with countries beyond the Five Eyes. In in the wake of this, in December 2021, it began to share intelligence publicly, marking the beginning of a new phase in the public use of intelligence. For Burns, the significance of the public use of intelligence was clear: ‘I think it’s helped to deny Putin something that I watched over many years him do quite adeptly, which was to create false narratives to stage what are called false-flag operations’.¹⁵ As former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul noted at the time: ‘I remember being in meetings and learning things that I thought it would be useful to tell the American people about and to tell the world about … And there were so many times that our intelligence community said, well, we can’t do that because that would expose the ways by which we acquired this intelligence’.¹⁶

This public use of intelligence in the pre-invasion period culminated in Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s remarks at the UN Security Council on 17 February 2022, at which he warned that:

Over the past months, without provocation or justification, Russia has amassed more than 150,000 troops around Ukraine’s borders, in Russia, Belarus, occupied Crimea. Russia says it’s drawing down those forces. We do not see that happening on the ground. Our information indicates clearly that these forces – including ground troops, aircraft, ships – are preparing to launch an attack against Ukraine in the coming days.¹⁷

He went on to outline the how he expected the invasion to unfold in four stages:

• Russia plans to manufacture a pretext for its attack. This could be a violent event that Russia will blame on Ukraine, or an outrageous accusation that Russia will level against the Ukrainian Government. We don’t know exactly the form it will take. It could be a fabricated so-called ‘terrorist’ bombing inside Russia, the invented discovery of a mass grave, a staged drone strike against civilians, or a fake – even a real – attack using chemical weapons. Russia may describe this event as ethnic cleansing or a genocide, making a mockery of a concept that we in this chamber do not take lightly, nor do I do take lightly based on my family history.

• Second, in response to this manufactured provocation, the highest levels of the Russian Government may theatrically convene emergency meetings to address the so-called crisis. The government will issue proclamations declaring that Russia must respond to defend Russian citizens or ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

• Next, the attack is planned to begin. Russian missiles and bombs will drop across Ukraine. Communications will be jammed. Cyberattacks will shut down key Ukrainian institutions.

• After that, Russian tanks and soldiers will advance on key targets that have already been identified and mapped out in detailed plans. We believe these targets include Russia’s capital – Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a city of 2.8 million people.¹⁸

However, Blinken’s public use of intelligence at the UN also recalled an earlier instance where a US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had made secret intelligence public in a pre-war context, that of Iraq in 2003, a legacy that Blinken could not avoid, telling the Security Council:

Now, I am mindful that some have called into question our information, recalling previous instances where intelligence ultimately did not bear out. But let me be clear: I am here today, not to start a war, but to prevent one. The information I’ve presented here is validated by what we’ve seen unfolding in plain sight before our eyes for months. And remember that while Russia has repeatedly derided our warnings and alarms as melodrama and nonsense, they have been steadily amassing more than 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, as well as the capabilities to conduct a massive military assault.¹⁹

Speaking at the National Security College in Canberra, Australia, just 36 days after Russia’s invasion, Sir Jeremy Fleming, Director of GCHQ, highlighted this strategy of making intelligence public in countering Russian disinformation and ‘making sure that the truth is told well’:

From the warnings of the war to the intelligence on false flag operations designed to provide a fake premise to the invasion. And more recently, to the Russian plans to falsely claim Ukrainian use of banned chemical weapons. On this and many other subjects, deeply secret intelligence is being released to make sure the truth is heard. At this pace and scale, it really is unprecedented. In my view, intelligence is only worth collecting if we use it, so I unreservedly welcome this development.²⁰

In his Canberra speech, Fleming combined reflections on Putin’s misjudgements with insights that GCHQ’s intelligence had been able to draw from the battlefield:

it increasingly looks like Putin has massively misjudged the situation. It’s clear he misjudged the resistance of the Ukrainian people. He underestimated the strength of the coalition his actions would galvanise. He under-played the economic consequences of the sanctions regime. He over-estimated the abilities of his military to secure a rapid victory. We’ve seen Russian soldiers – short of weapons and morale - refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft.²¹

As Fleming mentioned, a systematic and regular approach to the release of secret intelligence was being rolled out at this time (‘to make sure the truth is heard’), as the British Ministry of Defence started to release daily intelligence updates via social media containing declassified assessments of Russian capabilities and intents. This was a radical departure from the norm; rather than having these assessments filtered through political processes (as had happened in 2002, prior to the Iraq War), the public was provided with regular information about the build-up of forces prior to the invasion of Ukraine and about the progress of the war thereafter. The first of these, on 17 February 2022, reported that although Russia claimed that some of its forces had been withdrawn after an exercise, there was no sign of a reduction in troop levels around the border and that Russia still had the capability to invade Ukraine.²² The next, on 24^th February, reported that Russian troops had crossed the border and were advancing on three axes.²³ Since then, these regular updates have provided assessments of issues such as, Russian accusations that Ukraine was developing WMD,²⁴ tensions between the Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defence,²⁵ Russian artillery capabilities,²⁶ Ukraine’s energy reserves,²⁷ and Russia’s energy policy.²⁸ The update for 24 February 2024, the second anniversary of the invasion, assessed that despite heavy losses equal to the size of its original force, Russia had replaced these and had the capability to continue the war.²⁹

As of the beginning of March 2022 these updates bore the name of Defence Intelligence³⁰ instead of the Ministry of Defence, reinforcing the message that these are intelligence assessments. These updates are all accompanied by a link to explain the use of estimative language, to further educate the public.³¹ The longevity of these updates and increased engagement with the press by Defence Intelligence, inviting them to one of its establishments³² and providing confidential briefings in the same manner as other intelligence agencies,³³ is an indicator that such public engagement could be a new norm: that it will continue for the duration of this war and could well be repeated in future conflicts.

It is clear, then, that the war in Ukraine has acted as a catalyst, accelerating and deepening a trend towards greater openness in intelligence that was already evident prior to the Russian invasion.³⁴ At the same time, the public use of intelligence by western states has been carefully calibrated, with clear limits. Indicative of this, William Burns was, unsurprisingly, critical of leaks from anonymous US officials about the claimed role of US intelligence in the sinking of Russia’s Black Sea flagship the Moskva in April 2022, or that US intelligence had played any part in the targeting and killing of Russian generals, explaining that: ‘It is irresponsible. It’s dangerous when people talk too much, whether it’s leaking in private or talking in public about intelligence issues’.³⁵

The second section of this special issue addresses key aspects of Intelligence in War. The first article here, by Kevin Riehle, considers the performance of Russian intelligence in the war. There has been some illuminating commentary focusing on how Vladimir Putin uses intelligence and what has been termed the ‘autocratic mismanagement of intelligence’, wherein the nature of the political system generates an intelligence system ‘that is stunted in its capacity to offer dispassionate strategic assessments to political leaders’ and cannot function as a learning organisation.³⁶ As Greg Miller and Catherine Belton have reported, prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the FSB failed in its analysis and in performing its warning function; ‘analysts either did not fathom how forcefully Ukraine would respond, Ukrainian and Western officials said, or did understand but couldn’t or wouldn’t convey such sober assessments to Russian President Vladimir Putin’.³⁷ Kevin Riehle adds significantly to this analysis of the FSB’s initial performance and the potential problem of authoritarian receptivity to intelligence by contributing analysis of an area that has received rather less attention: the FSB’s wartime intelligence collection and the transformative impact of the war on Russia’s intelligence collection activities and apparatus.

The second aspect covered in this section is the cyber dimension and its impact on the course of the war. Immediately prior to and following the February 2022 invasion, both Antony Blinken and Jeremy Fleming referred in their public comments to the expected cyber dimension. One element of the ‘playbook’ outlined by Blinken at the UN Security Council in February 2022 involved Russia shutting down key Ukrainian institutions with cyberattacks. At the end of March 2022, Fleming told his audience:

There has been commentary expressing surprise that we haven’t seen the Russians deploy a major cyber-attack as part of their campaign. I think a lot of this misses the point. Whilst some people look for cyber ‘Pearl Harbours’, it was never our understanding that a catastrophic cyber-attack was central to Russian’s use of offensive cyber or to their military doctrine. To think otherwise, misjudges how cyber has an effect in military campaigns.³⁸

So, how has the role of cyber played out in the first two years of the war? What impact has it had? These questions are the focus of the detailed study by Aaron and Nataliya Brantly. In explaining the role and impact of cyber in the war they emphasise the importance of understanding the February 2022 full-scale Russian military invasion not as the beginning of the war but as a new phase in a conflict that has been underway since 2014 and in which cyber-attacks or incidents have been an ongoing feature with a range of impacts.

Finally in this section, Philip Davies analyses the counterintelligence aspects of the war in an article that represents a contribution to how to think about counterintelligence as a concept as well as to understanding its place in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Davies too emphasises the importance of viewing the current war as one that began long before the February 2022 military invasion, and of going back to the period prior to the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and Donbas war to fully understand the counterintelligence challenges Ukraine has faced. Also significant here is the legacy of Ukraine’s pre-independence history on its post-independence security structures and culture. For Davies, this legacy contributed to a ‘counterintelligence perfect storm’ from which important lessons arise for NATO member states and for thinking about how to approach counterintelligence more generally.

The final section of this special issue looks at OSINT, Social Media, and the Information War, an area in which the distinctive characteristics of this war – a mid-20^th century European land war that is also contested in the digital information space by a wide range of state and non-state intelligence actors – are most apparent. As Andrew Hoskins has put it, the Russo-Ukrainian war, ‘is the ultimate realisation of “participative war” where digital apps and platforms blur the distinctions between soldier, civilian and information warrior’.³⁹

Magdalene Karalis analyses the intricate dynamics of online disinformation campaigns and their impact on the ongoing war, as well as the important role of open-source investigations in debunking false claims. Next, Peter Schrijver provides a case study of the Security Service of Ukraine’s (SBU) use of its Telegram channel for social media outreach during the Russo-Ukrainian War, and the role of this activity in influencing public discourse and transforming its public image. In their contribution, David Oakley and Jeff Rogg analyse the place of propaganda and social media in the Russo-Ukrainian War, reflecting on the nature of OSINT, the consequences of the uses of social media in the war, and the impact of all this on civil-intelligence relations in the United States. Finally, Irena Chiru and Cristina Ivan look at the role of forms of strategic communication used by Ukraine following the Russian military invasion, often involving social media, to promote narratives of identity, cohesion and resilience in the Ukrainian intelligence community, with an emphasis on heroism, efficacy, and the pursuit of justice, and affording intelligence and its leaders a much more public profile than they had prior to February 2022. They extend their analysis of the role of social media in the war to also consider the implications for Romania, given its geographical proximity to Russia and vulnerability to Russian disinformation, and approaches to creating societal awareness of, and resilience to, this. The authors draw on the results of semi-structured interviews with experts and a survey of Romanian students in exploring possible responses, including in the area of public intelligence and the evolving role of intelligence in response to the rising tide of disinformation resulting from the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Collectively, the articles in this section explore important questions concerning the relationship between citizens and intelligence. Clearly, the public has been far from a passive recipient of intelligence during the Russo-Ukrainian War. Organisations such as Bellingcat have enabled a new generation of ‘citizen journalists’ to produce sophisticated assessments using press reporting, social media, mapping tools, and their own expertise. Bellingcat first came to prominence when it reported on the use of chemical weapons in Syria and the shooting down of Flight MH 17 over Ukraine in 2014. Its reporting on that incident was instrumental in the prosecution case against those believed responsible for shooting down the aircraft.⁴⁰ On Ukraine, this combination of open source information and expertise has enabled Bellingcat to produce detailed reports on Russian equipment⁴¹ and Russian attacks on civilians.⁴² While the implications of this kind of crowdsourced intelligence deserve study in general, there is one aspect of the active involvement of citizens in intelligence that needs urgent attention. The Ukrainian government has encouraged civilians to use smartphone apps to warn of Russian attacks and report Russian troop movements.⁴³ This raises both legal and ethical problems because of the potential hazard to civilians. The government has created an app to warn of air raids and restructured another to allow civilians to report Russian positions.⁴⁴ The legal problem here is the question of whether or not this causes civilians who use these apps to lose their protected status under the Geneva Conventions. Broadly speaking, civilians are protected as long as they do not play a direct part in hostilities. What constitutes an ‘direct part’ is something of a grey area; while picking up a rifle and engaging in combat is clearly a direct part, other actions, including reporting on troop locations, is largely dependent on the interpretation of certain criteria.⁴⁵ This is already causing concern to the US Army and the implications are being considered for future training.⁴⁶ There is evidence to suggest Russian troops are executing civilians they suspect of reporting on positions.⁴⁷ This opens up a new area of exploration in the field of intelligence ethics given the potential harm to which the government is exposing its citizens. Intelligence ethics, particularly in the context of human intelligence collection, has frameworks such as Just Intelligence Theory to consider the potential harm to informants or targets of collection, but not on this new, unprecedented, scale. Intelligence engagement with the public in war clearly has its advantages, particularly in terms of maintaining public trust and confidence in intelligence services, but in some areas – such as asking the public to engage in intelligence during hostilities – requires careful thought.

At the time of writing, on the second anniversary of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, there seems to be no clear route to ending the war soon: there is no prospect of the kind of Russian military victory that Vladimir Putin envisioned at the time of the invasion and there seems no prospect of Ukraine expelling Russian forces entirely from Ukrainian territory, at least without a scale of NATO commitment that its members have been unwilling to countenance and is likely to lead to an escalation of the conflict. A firm basis for any negotiated settlement is absent, not least in terms of Ukrainian trust that Russia would stick to the terms of a negotiated deal. As a consequence of the war to date, an inherently dynamic intelligence landscape has seen further evolution, and the articles presented here explain how and draw out key lessons to be learned. However, given this prognosis, this special issue may represent only an interim statement on the nature, roles and impact of intelligence in the war.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Phythian

Mark Phythian is Professor of Politics in the School of History, Politics & International Relations, University of Leicester and co-editor of Intelligence and National Security.

David Strachan-Morris

David Strachan-Morris, SFHEA, MSecII is the Programme Director for the Distance Learning MA in Intelligence and Security and Co-Director of Distance Learning for the School of History Politics & International Relations at the University of Leicester. Previously, he worked as a political and security risk analyst in the private sector and served in the British Army as an intelligence operator. He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Policing Intelligence and Counterterrorism, the Journal of Security Intelligence and Resilience Education, and Intelligence and National Security as well as being a board member of the Europe Chapter of the International Association for Intelligence Education.

Notes

1. See, for example, York, ‘‘World’s first TikTok war.”

2. Omand, How Spies Think.

3. Putin vs. the West, series 2:1, “Invasion,” BBC, 29 January 2024: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001ttrx/putin-vs-the-west-at-war-1-invasion

4. Putin vs. the West, series 2:1, “Invasion,’ BBC, 29 January 2024: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001ttrx/putin-vs-the-west-at-war-1-invasion

5. Cited in Politi et al, “Biden’s Information War With Putin.”

6. Sage, “French Spy Chief is Ousted Over Failure to Predict War.”

7. French media reported other reasons for his dismissal. Vincent, “Les leçons de la guerre en Ukraine.”

8. Vincent, “Guerre en Ukraine.”

9. See also the analysis of Michael Jonsson, “Swedish Intelligence, Russia and the War in Ukraine: Anticipations, Course, and Future Implications,” in this volume.

10. Vincent, “Les leçons de la guerre en Ukraine.”

11. See also Perrin & Todeschini, “Ukraine: Un an de Guerre. Quels enseignements pour la France,” 1.

12. We would like to thank Damien Van Puyvelde for this analysis of the case of France.

13. Trofimov, Our Enemies Will Vanish, 21.

14. Matthews, Overreach, 197–198; Plokhy, The Russo-Ukrainian War, 143.

15. Quoted in Luce, “The World from Washington.”

16. Politi et al, “Biden’s Information War.”

17. Blinken, “on Russia’s Threat to Peace and Security.”

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Fleming, “Director GCHQ’s speech on global security amid war in Ukraine.”

21. Ibid.

22. Ministry of Defence, “Update on Ukraine, 17 February 2022,” https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=317713153732492&set=pb.100064814287886.–2207520000&type=3&locale=en_GB, (accessed 27 Feb 2024).

23. Ministry of Defence, “Update on Ukraine, 24 February 2022,” https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=322467986590342&set=pb.100064814287886.–2207520000&type=3&locale=en_GB, (accessed 27 Feb 2024).

24. Defence Intelligence, “Update on Ukraine, 08 March 2022,” https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=330397982464009&set=pb.100064814287886.–2207520000&type=3&locale=en_GB, (accessed 27 Feb 2024).

25. Defence Intelligence, “Update on Ukraine, 6 June 2023,” https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=653922093444928&set=pb.100064814287886.–2207520000&type=3&locale=en_GB, (accessed 27 Feb 2024).

26. Defence Intelligence, “Update on Ukraine, 17 July 2023,” https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=667589352078202&set=pb.100064814287886.–2207520000&type=3&locale=en_GB, (accessed 27 Feb 2024)

27. Defence Intelligence, “Ukraine Update, 17 August 2023,” https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=697709089066228&set=pb.100064814287886.–2207520000&type=3&locale=en_GB, (accessed 27 Feb 2024).

28. Defence Intelligence, “Ukraine Update, 26 February 2024,” https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1762048072320688408, (accessed 27 Feb 2024).

29. Defence Intelligence, “Ukraine Update, 24 February 2024,” https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1761316030121423346, (accessed 27 Feb 2024).

30. Defence Intelligence is the UK Ministry of Defence intelligence capability but is not an intelligence agency as such.

31. Ministry of Defence, “Defence Intelligence – Communicating Probability,” 17 February 2023: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/defence-intelligence-communicating-probability, (accessed 27 Feb 2024).

32. Nicholls, “RAF Wyton.”

33. Sabbagh, “UK closer to large-scale conflict than in many years, Defence official says.”

34. Zegart, ‘Open Secrets’.

35. Luce, “The World from Washington,” On the claims of a US intelligence role, see Cooper et al, “US Intelligence Helped Ukraine Strike Russian Flagship, Officials Say.”

36. Dylan et al, “The Autocrat’s Intelligence Paradox,” 387.

37. Miller & Belton, “Russia’s spies misread Ukraine and misled Kremlin as war loomed,” In his March 2022 Canberra speech, Jeremy Fleming noted how, “we believe Putin’s advisers are afraid to tell him the truth,” Fleming, “Director GCHQ’s speech,” See also, the assessment in Riehle, The Russian FSB, Ch.7.

38. Fleming, “Director GCHQ’s speech.”

39. Cited in York, ‘‘World’s first TikTok war”.

40. Holligan & Vandy, “MH17: Three guilty as court finds Russia-controlled group downed airliner,” (accessed 27 Feb. 2024).

41. Kivimäki, “Tankspotting: Russian T90s in the Donbas,” (accessed 27 Feb. 2024).

42. Bellingcat Investigations Team, “Russia’s Kremenchuk Claims versus the Evidence,” (accessed 27 Feb. 2024).

43. Olejnik, “Smartphones blur the line between civilian and combatant,” (accessed 27 Feb. 2024).

44. Ibid.

45. Melzer, Interpretive Guidance on the Notion of Direct Participation in Hostilities Under International Humanitarian Law, 46.

46. Freese, “Smart Phones Enabling Decisive Effects at Tactical Level in Ukraine.”

47. Judah, “How Kyiv was saved by Ukrainian ingenuity as well as Russian blunders.”