By Alexander Motyl
Aug 25, 2025
National Security Journal
Key Points and Summary – The biggest threat to Ukraine may not be on the battlefield, but in the flawed commentary of Western military analysts.
-This “fraternity of failure,” as one historian calls it, wrongly predicted Kyiv would fall in three days and continues to misread the conflict by consistently overestimating Russian strengths while underestimating Ukrainian resilience.
-By obsessing over minor Russian territorial gains and ignoring the staggering Russian casualties required to achieve them, these experts paint a skewed and dangerously pessimistic picture of the war, born from a fundamental misunderstanding of both nations.
The Experts’ Ukraine War Mistakes
Does Ukraine need to be “saved”? Yes, but not quite how you may think.
It’s become the conventional wisdom in some circles that Ukraine can’t defeat Russia, even as many reasonable observers concur that Russia lacks the capacity to win and, as much as Vladimir Putin may want to, destroy Ukraine.
We don’t know how and when the war will end. The only thing we can state with certainty is that, as the Ukrainian national anthem puts it, “Ukraine still lives.” And will continue living as long as Putin mismanages Russia and magnifies its weaknesses.
What Ukraine really needs to be saved from is bad Western analysis. (Russian analysis, or more precisely Putin’s analysis, which brought about this unnecessary bloodletting, is by definition bad.)
A recent conversation between the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and the military historian Phillips O’Brien focuses on this failing in great detail.
Says Krugman: “You recently wrote that we have the worst military analysis community in the history of military analysis communities.”
To which O’Brien replies: “They just don’t know how to judge war. Never have. This is the same group of analysts that said Kiev would fall in three days and Russia is a great power and the war would be quick and fast. And now they seem to be watching and obsessing about every little—not even village—almost every little farm field in the Donbas, and impregnating all of these tiny little Russian advances or failures to advance as some part of the indication of an impending Ukrainian collapse or anything in the like. They just don’t understand, I think, how to judge a war and what really matters.”
A little later, Krugman remarks, “So it’s not just that you keep on having the same analytical error about the nature of the war, but it’s the same people who get quoted again and again. Why does it work that way?”
And here’s O’Brien’s scathing response: “Because it’s a fraternity of failure. So many people were so wrong that it’s much easier for them to defend each other and keep hiring each other and keep referring to each other than admit that they all screwed up and don’t know what they’re talking about. So it was a community that failed, not just a few people, a whole community failed. Everyone got it wrong. And that somehow makes it okay. We all got it wrong. And all that means is that the same people who got it wrong to begin with are getting it wrong now, but they’re being treated as if they have any idea of what they’re talking about when they don’t.”
Here’s my guess as to why “they” got it wrong. Their first mistake was to believe Putin’s claims about Russia’s greatness and misunderstand the nature of his ideologically-driven fascist regime. Their second mistake was to believe Russian propaganda about Ukraine—that it’s a hopelessly corrupt failed state that can be toppled in a few days—and to misunderstand the nature of Ukraine’s democratically-driven civil society and identity.
As a result, analysts saw Ukraine’s weaknesses and Russian strengths, while ignoring Ukraine’s strengths and Russia’s weaknesses.
A good example of this kind of skewed analysis is provided by Harvard University’s Russia Matters website. It always starts its reporting with estimates of Russian territorial advances. Fair enough, but what’s missing from this picture of inexorable and unstoppable Russian gains? For one thing, context: those inexorable advances amount to less than one percent of Ukraine. For another, cost: Russia Matters fails to provide estimates of Russian casualties, which amount to about 1,000 dead and wounded daily.
But the prize for bad analysis surely has to go to Josh Hammer, a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times. Hammer may or may not be right in his optimistic assessment of President Trump’s ability to reach a peace. I for one wish he is, but I’d have more confidence in his analysis if it weren’t for the following throw-away line: “The borders of the Donbas region — full of ethnically/linguistically divided Russian/Ukrainian towns — must be redrawn too. The granular cartographic details are beyond our scope, but the general guiding principle should be self-determination and peace over permanent strife and proxy war.”
Now, as anyone with an inkling of today’s Russian politics knows, those “granular cartographic details”—i.e. Ukraine—are why Putin launched the war and annexed all of the Donbas and why he will not let “self-determination and peace” be a “guiding principle.” To state that these details are “beyond our scope” is effectively to admit to impotence and ignorance.
And to advise Ukraine to let itself be saved by Western impotence and ignorance.
Dr. Alexander Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, including Pidsumky imperii (2009); Puti imperii (2004); Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001); Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (1999); Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (1993); and The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (1980); the editor of 15 volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2000) and The Holodomor Reader (2012); and a contributor of dozens of articles to academic and policy journals, newspaper op-ed pages, and magazines. He also has a weekly blog, “Ukraine’s Orange Blues.”