For more than two months, the crisis around Ukraine has revolved around a question nobody outside the Kremlin can answer with certainty: does Vladimir Putin actually intend to order a major Russian military operation?
This week, the United States has increasingly tried to change the question.
Rather than simply warning that Russia possesses the capability to invade, American officials are publicly describing what they say Russian planning may look like before anything happens. On Thursday, the US government alleged that Russia could fabricate a pretext for military action, potentially involving a staged incident that could then be presented as evidence of Ukrainian aggression. Moscow rejected the allegation.
Normally, governments protect intelligence.
They classify it, restrict access to it and reveal as little as possible about how they know what they know. Intelligence has strategic value partly because the other side does not know which of its activities have been observed.
The United States is now deliberately giving some of that advantage away.
That suggests Washington believes the information may be more useful public than secret.
If so, intelligence is no longer functioning only as information about Russian strategy. It is becoming part of American strategy itself.
The logic is relatively straightforward. Imagine Russia wanted to create an incident that could be presented domestically and internationally as justification for military action. Such an operation would work partly because observers would initially be uncertain about what happened. Russia could provide its version of events, Ukraine could provide another, and governments would have to determine which account was credible while events moved quickly.
Now imagine the United States publicly predicts the alleged strategy beforehand.
If an incident later resembles the prediction, Russia faces a credibility problem. Governments and journalists are more likely to interpret the event through the possibility that it was manufactured.
The operation may still occur.
Its informational value has been reduced.
This is deterrence through disclosure.
The United States is attempting to make a possible Russian strategy more expensive by revealing it before Moscow can use it.
That is an interesting development because we normally think about deterrence through military and economic power. Russia attacks, sanctions follow. Russia attacks, Ukrainian forces impose battlefield costs. NATO reinforces its eastern members.
Information can impose costs too.
A covert operation works because attribution is uncertain. Remove the uncertainty and part of the advantage disappears.
This resembles what transparency does in domestic politics. The Pandora Papers mattered because hidden financial relationships lose some of their political value once exposed. Corruption becomes more difficult when ownership is visible. Government misconduct becomes more expensive when journalists can reveal it.
International politics contains a similar relationship between secrecy and power.
Some strategies depend on nobody knowing who is responsible.
Public intelligence can attack that dependency.
But there is an obvious problem.
The public has to trust the intelligence.
That is not automatic.
The United States has a serious credibility problem created by the 2003 Iraq War. American officials presented intelligence suggesting Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Those stockpiles were not found.
The political consequences of that failure extend far beyond Iraq because intelligence claims operate through reputation.
If a government says, “Trust us, we have classified evidence,” citizens cannot independently examine much of the evidence. They are therefore partly evaluating the credibility of the institution providing it.
Past mistakes change that calculation.
This is why governments can spend credibility.
An intelligence failure today reduces the persuasive power of accurate intelligence tomorrow.
That does not mean every American intelligence claim should now be assumed false because Iraq happened. That would be as irrational as assuming every claim must be correct.
It means the evidentiary standard should be higher.
Governments should release enough information to make claims independently assessable where doing so does not expose sources or methods. Journalists should distinguish what has been demonstrated from what officials assert. Citizens should maintain scepticism without turning scepticism into automatic disbelief.
That is a difficult balance.
The modern information environment makes it harder because political audiences increasingly interpret factual claims through partisan or geopolitical identity.
If Washington says Russia is preparing a provocation, supporters of American policy may accept it immediately.
People distrustful of America may reject it immediately.
Neither response is analysis.
The correct probability is not determined by whether we like the government making the claim.
We should ask what evidence exists, what incentives the government has to misrepresent it, whether independent sources support it, and how the claim fits observable behaviour.
Russia has amassed substantial military forces around Ukraine. That is observable.
Russia continues to deny planning an invasion. That is also observable.
The United States says intelligence indicates preparations consistent with possible military action. That claim deserves serious attention, particularly given the scale of the deployment.
It remains a claim about intentions.
Those categories should not be collapsed.
This distinction between capability and intent has become central to the crisis. Russia clearly possesses the capability to conduct significant military operations against Ukraine. Whether Putin has decided to use that capability remains uncertain.
Intelligence tries to reduce that uncertainty.
Public intelligence tries to do something more: change the decision itself.
That is an important difference.
Usually we imagine intelligence as a camera. It helps a government see what another actor is doing.
Here it is being used more like a spotlight.
The act of illuminating the behaviour may alter it.
This resembles the observer effect in a political rather than scientific sense. Once an adversary knows a particular strategy has been identified, it can change strategy. That creates both an advantage and a cost.
The advantage is deterrence.
The cost is losing visibility.
Suppose American intelligence has discovered how Russia communicates about a particular covert plan. Publicly revealing details may cause Moscow to abandon that plan and change its communications.
The immediate threat may decline.
American intelligence may also lose access to valuable information about future Russian behaviour.
Washington therefore has to decide whether the short-term value of disrupting a possible operation exceeds the long-term value of protecting intelligence sources.
The fact that officials are releasing information suggests they consider the immediate risk unusually serious.
This is one reason the disclosure strategy itself provides information.
Even without seeing the classified evidence, we can infer something from the government’s willingness to expose it.
That inference should not be exaggerated. Governments can also release intelligence for political reasons.
But costly signals are generally more informative than cheap statements.
Saying “we are concerned” costs almost nothing.
Potentially compromising intelligence capabilities costs something.
The willingness to pay that cost may indicate the level of concern inside Washington.
Diplomacy is continuing at the same time. French President Emmanuel Macron is preparing to meet Putin in Moscow and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv. Other European leaders are intensifying contacts, while the United States and NATO continue rejecting Russia’s demand for guarantees that Ukraine will never join the alliance.
This combination of intelligence disclosure, military assistance, sanctions threats and diplomacy illustrates something important about statecraft.
Governments rarely have one strategy.
They construct portfolios of pressure and reassurance.
Military assistance tells Russia an attack may be harder.
Sanctions threats tell Russia an attack may be economically expensive.
Public intelligence tells Russia certain covert methods may be exposed.
Diplomacy tells Russia there is still a path through which some security concerns can be discussed without military action.
Each instrument affects a different part of the calculation.
The challenge is ensuring they reinforce rather than contradict one another.
Too much reassurance can weaken deterrence.
Too much pressure can convince the adversary that negotiation offers nothing.
A credible strategy needs both a cost for escalation and a benefit for restraint.
This is why the debate over whether Western governments are being “strong” or “weak” towards Russia is not particularly useful. Strength is not a policy instrument.
A threat can sound extremely strong and fail because nobody believes it.
A compromise can look weak and reduce a security risk at almost no strategic cost.
The relevant question is whether each action changes incentives in the desired direction.
Putin’s incentives remain difficult to determine because we do not know his objective.
If the military deployment is principally coercive diplomacy, then Russia may be seeking an agreement it can present as a strategic victory. In that case, sufficiently meaningful negotiations could allow de-escalation.
If Putin has already decided that Ukraine’s political trajectory can be changed only through military force, diplomatic concessions may have much less effect.
This is why understanding the adversary’s objective matters more than interpreting their personality.
Commentary frequently reduces foreign policy to psychological descriptions: Putin is aggressive, paranoid, rational, irrational, nostalgic for the Soviet Union or obsessed with restoring Russian greatness.
Some of those characteristics may contain truth.
They are difficult to measure and even harder to use for policy.
Governments need more concrete questions. What outcomes does Moscow prioritise? What costs has it historically accepted to pursue them? What compromises has it previously accepted? Which Russian institutions influence the decision? How does Putin interpret Ukraine’s movement towards Western institutions?
Those questions can generate testable expectations.
Personality labels mostly generate confidence.
There is also an important difference between Russian security and Putin’s conception of Russian security.
Governments frequently speak as though national interests objectively exist. In reality, political leaders interpret them.
One Russian government could conclude that a prosperous, independent Ukraine integrated economically with Europe poses little military threat. Another could conclude that losing political influence over Ukraine fundamentally weakens Russia’s strategic position.
The geography is the same.
The interpretation changes.
National interest is therefore partly material and partly constructed through political beliefs.
That does not make it imaginary. Beliefs create real behaviour.
But it means deterrence has to target the decision-maker’s perceived interests rather than an abstract model of what Russia “should” want.
Ukraine faces a different information problem. President Volodymyr Zelensky has at times appeared less alarmed publicly than some Western officials, warning that excessive predictions of imminent war can themselves damage Ukraine’s economy.
That position makes sense.
Ukraine needs Western governments to take the military threat seriously enough to provide support.
It also needs investors, businesses and citizens not to behave as though war is already inevitable.
If international warnings produce capital flight, falling investment or panic, Russia can impose costs on Ukraine without crossing the border.
This demonstrates again that information itself can become a weapon.
A military mobilisation creates economic effects through expectations.
The more people believe war is coming, the greater those effects become.
Russia therefore does not need to invade to impose some costs on Ukraine.
The threat itself has value.
Western warnings can unintentionally amplify part of that value.
This does not mean officials should conceal genuine intelligence simply to protect markets. It means communication has consequences.
Policymakers need to distinguish warning from certainty.
“Russia has developed the capability to attack and the risk is serious” communicates useful information.
“War is inevitable” can create behaviour that makes Ukraine weaker even if the prediction is wrong.
This is why probabilistic language matters.
Political communication often dislikes probabilities because they sound indecisive. Intelligence analysis depends on them because certainty is usually unavailable.
The public may need to become more comfortable with statements such as “we assess this is likely, but we could be wrong.”
That is not weakness.
It is an accurate description of reasoning under incomplete information.
The alternative is false certainty, which creates enormous credibility costs when events change.
This is particularly important because successful deterrence can make an intelligence prediction appear wrong.
Suppose American intelligence correctly concludes that Russia intends to undertake a particular operation. Washington reveals the plan. Moscow abandons it because it has been exposed.
The operation never happens.
Critics then say the intelligence was false.
This is a version of the prevention paradox again.
Policy changes the outcome against which the original prediction is judged.
We saw the same problem with COVID restrictions: if intervention prevents hospitals from collapsing, people can later argue the intervention was unnecessary because hospitals did not collapse.
Counterfactual reasoning is unavoidable.
The fact that something did not happen does not prove it was never going to happen.
Nor does it prove deterrence prevented it.
We have to evaluate the mechanism and available evidence rather than simply comparing prediction with outcome.
This makes public intelligence a politically risky strategy for Biden. If Russia does not attack, critics may accuse Washington of exaggerating the threat. If Russia does attack in a way resembling American warnings, the intelligence will appear remarkably prescient.
But the objective should not be winning that argument.
The objective should be making the first outcome more likely.
This is one of the strange features of competent foreign policy. The government should prefer a future in which its most dramatic warnings look unnecessary because the disaster they warned about never occurred.
Political incentives do not always reward that.
Leaders receive credit for defeating enemies.
They receive much less visible credit for changing an adversary’s calculation before conflict begins.
As of tonight, diplomacy remains active and Russia continues denying that it plans an invasion. We should preserve that uncertainty.
The military build-up is serious.
The American warnings are serious.
Neither makes war inevitable.
The most interesting development this week is therefore not another troop number or diplomatic meeting. It is the way information itself has entered the confrontation.
Washington appears to believe that one way to prevent Russia carrying out certain actions is to describe those actions before Russia carries them out.
That strategy depends on something governments cannot manufacture instantly: credibility.
If the United States is right, disclosure may remove some of the ambiguity Russia could otherwise exploit.
If the United States repeatedly makes claims it cannot substantiate, the strategy will eventually destroy itself because future warnings will carry less weight.
Information therefore behaves like many other forms of political power.
Its effectiveness depends not only on possessing it, but on whether other people believe you possess it.
The intelligence community can know something.
Deterrence begins when the adversary knows that you know.
Public diplomacy begins when everyone else believes you too.
