The Full-Scale War

OPENING SCENE

Kyiv, February 24, 2022. At 5:54 AM local time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky posted a video from central Kyiv — shot on a phone, clearly recorded outdoors — confirming that he was still in the capital and not fleeing. "We are all here," he said in Ukrainian. "Our soldiers are here. Citizens of society are here. We are all here defending our independence, our country." The video was short, unpolished, and immediately viral. Russian planners had assessed, based on the behavior of other governments facing Russian military pressure, that the political leadership would evacuate under the pressure of missile strikes. Several Western governments, including the United States, had privately advised Zelensky to do exactly that. He declined.

Three days before, on February 21, Putin had sat at the end of a long table in a gilded Kremlin hall and conducted what was framed as a meeting of the Security Council to deliberate on recognizing the two Russian-backed separatist entities in eastern Ukraine — the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics — as independent states. The meeting, televised in full, was later described by former Russian officials as staged in a way unusual even by Kremlin standards. Members of the council were called on individually to state their positions. One of them — Sergei Naryshkin, director of the Foreign Intelligence Service — appeared to misread the situation entirely, saying that he supported accepting the two territories' requests to join the Russian Federation rather than merely recognizing them as independent states. Putin interrupted him, visibly irritated, and Naryshkin stumbled through a correction. The moment was a glimpse of what advisors who had been around Putin for twenty years had learned: that the meeting was not for deliberation. It was for producing a visible record of collective endorsement for a decision already made.

Three days later, the missiles were in the air.