The autocrat’s intelligence paradox: Vladimir Putin’s (mis)management of Russian strategic assessment in the Ukraine War
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221146113 |
| Author | Huw Dylan,David V. Gioe,Elena Grossfeld |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221146113
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2023, Vol. 25(3) 385 –404
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13691481221146113
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
The autocrat’s intelligence
paradox: Vladimir Putin’s
(mis)management of Russian
strategic assessment in the
Ukraine War
Huw Dylan , David V. Gioe
and Elena Grossfeld
Abstract
Autocratic leaders rely on intelligence machineries for regime and personal security. They often
manage large, powerful, unaccountable organisations, which they hold close. But, despite their close
relationship with - and reliance upon - intelligence, autocrats also frequently struggle to use it to
enhance decision-making and foreign policy, and consequently suffer avoidable intelligence failures.
This article argues that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is illustrative of this broader,
though understudied, pattern of autocratic mismanagement of strategic intelligence. The invasion
was both spurred and accompanied by a catastrophic intelligence failure, the responsibility for which
rests with Vladimir Putin, the arbiter of a system with limited capacity to offer dispassionate strategic
assessments. His failure is characteristic of autocratic regimes assessing foreign developments,
including Putin’s Soviet predecessors. This article contributes to the emerging scholarship on
intelligence in autocratic regimes by examining Putin’s use of intelligence in the Ukraine War in the
context of the broader literature on intelligence and decision.
Keywords
cognitive bias, intelligence failure, statecraft, strategic intelligence, Ukraine War, Vladimir Putin
Introduction: The Chekist in the Kremlin
Vladimir Putin cut his professional teeth as a mid-level functionary in the Soviet KGB,
the Kremlin’s intelligence, counterintelligence, and security service. What precisely he
did during his time in the organisation is unclear, but it is well established that he served
in the German Democratic Republic performing tasks related to economic intelligence
and supporting Russian illegals, those intelligence officers under nonofficial cover
(Belton, 2020). This intelligence experience seems to have been the touchstone of his
King’s College London, London, UK
Corresponding author:
Huw Dylan, King’s College London, London, WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: huw.dylan@kcl.ac.uk
1146113BPI0010.1177/13691481221146113The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsDylan et al.
research-article2022
Original Article
386 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 25(3)
career (Hill, 2016). After the Cold War he had a brief career in the Saint Petersburg
administration, but he soon returned to the fold. In 1998, President Boris Yeltsin appointed
him head of the FSB (the Federal Security Service). He is undoubtedly a creature of the
Soviet secret state (Hill, 2016). This was a point not lost on his domestic opponents from
early on in his tenure. One of his most trenchant critics, the late, murdered journalist Anna
Politkovskaya used to refer to him as ‘that strutting Chekist’ (Sweeney, 2022).
Most heads of state have little experience of using intelligence as a lever of state power
before assuming office. Some adapt well; others do not (Lockhart and Moran, 2022). Like
any other element of the bureaucracy, leaders must learn to utilise the system if they are
to benefit from its fullest potential. For Putin, being both a KGB officer and, briefly, head
of its primary successor service, the FSB, would have seemed to offer a major advantage
in using intelligence for statecraft. Indeed, Putin’s formative experience and continued
close engagement with the intelligence and security state has served him well in several
senses. It allowed him to consolidate, retain, strengthen, and reward his power base. He
has used elements of Russia’s intelligence and security machinery effectively to control
and oppress opponents of his regime, at home and abroad. To repression add a penchant
for espionage and aggressive active measures, some traditional and others with a modern
digital twist in the cyber era (Gioe, 2018). Russia’s expertise in penetrating adversary
computer networks to steal secrets or engage in more disruptive action is judged to be
formidable (Devanny et al., 2021; Soldatov, 2017). Indeed, until his disastrous miscalcu-
lation in invading Ukraine, conventional wisdom held that Putin’s professional back-
ground conferred on him a perspective rarely enjoyed by senior political figures in great
powers in matters related to secrecy and security.
However, the initial stages of the Ukraine War called many of the assumptions regard-
ing Putin’s competence in the use of strategic intelligence into question. The invasion was
preceeded and accompanied by significant intelligence failures. How did a leader so
steeped in intelligence use his organisations so ineffectively before such a major policy
decision? This article explores the nature of Putin’s intelligence failure based on the evi-
dence available through English and Russian language sources, and it considers Putin’s
limits, despite his own professional experience, as an intelligence customer and manager.
It features the Russo-Ukraine War as its major case study and offers an original perspec-
tive on the nature of the failures witnessed in 2022. In addition, by linking the emerging
empirical evidence with the existing body of intelligence studies scholarship focused on
the consumer–producer relationship and intelligence failure, it offers insights both into
the factors that drove Moscow’s failure, and places them in a historical perspective,
underlining them as both quintessentially Putinesque, and also typically autocratic.
This article contributes to three developing and interconnected fields of literature:
intelligence and the Ukraine War, which has received a significant amount of media cov-
erage but, despite some exceptions, (Dylan and Maguire, 2022; Gioe and Styles, 2022),
remains in its infancy as an academic topic; Putin as an intelligence manager and con-
sumer, which has received far more scholarly attention (for instance, Belton, 2020; Hill
and Gaddy, 2015; Lewis, 2022); and authoritarian leaders and their intelligence systems,
which, despite notable exceptions (such as Andrew, 2004; Hatfield, 2022), is a sparsely
populated academic field. It is in connecting and working across these disciplinary silos
that we make our contribution by analysing the events in Ukraine in reference to scholar-
ship about Russia and Putin generally, and about intelligence and security in particular.
This article makes two main claims. First, that Putin’s approach to intelligence as a
tool of statecraft is fundamentally flawed, focusing more energy on crushing dissent and
To continue reading
Request your trial