Caught off guard? Evaluating how external experts in Germany warned about Russia’s war on Ukraine

Abstract

While Germany’s response to the Russo-Ukrainian war continues to be intensely scrutinised, with much attention focusing on the Zeitenwende debate and Berlin’s reluctance to pull its weight in NATO, we know little about how Germany anticipated the outbreak of war. The picture that has emerged is one of significant surprise among German policymakers when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Germany’s foreign intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) has been criticised for failing to issue strong warnings, whereas BND officials have argued that their warnings went unheeded. This article contributes to discussions of what intelligence producers and policymakers could have been expected to know by exploring how selected external experts in Germany warned about a Russian attack on Ukraine. By reconstructing open expert assessments of the emerging crisis between 1 November 2021 and 23 February 2022, this article finds that researchers in German think tanks and academia provided a steady flow of timely, accurate and convincing warnings. The findings suggest that external experts are especially well positioned to uncover structural vulnerabilities that threatening actors can exploit, discuss politically inconvenient trends, and offer actionable warnings. This adds to discussions of how external expertise can support intelligence production and crisis decision-making.