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Why did so many downplay the risk of a Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 despite mounting indicators, such as troop build-ups, major exercises, and increasingly aggressive rhetoric from Moscow?

Even hours before the first strikes, major media outlets argued that an invasion was unlikely, as it seemed to contradict President Vladimir Putin’s cost-benefit calculus. They assumed he would conclude that the costs of heavy Western sanctions, together with the risk of significant battlefield casualties, outweighed the potential gains.

Many analysts and observers underestimated the likelihood of invasion in part because they modeled Russia as a typical state in which checks from domestic elites significantly constrain the leader. Most states, whether democratic or authoritarian, have internal power structures that force leaders to constantly bargain with a coalition of insiders to stay in office and secure cooperation to execute policy. However, by February 2022, Putin had been in control — either directly by holding office or indirectly, during Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency — for more than two decades. In this time, he progressively purged, replaced, and remodeled elite groups, ensuring loyalist predominance while the institutional arrangements he established made elite dissent costly and coordination among dissident elites difficult. This cumulative process left Putin with enough political latitude to order a large-scale invasion that many outside observers thought a leader in his position could not politically afford to initiate. This was not the only driver of his decision — false optimism and his personal worldview also played a crucial role — but it was an important structural condition that many analysts underweighted.

The practical takeaway is that analysts should treat leader tenure as one important proxy for entrenchment, especially when longer tenure correlates with other indicators, such as elite purges. As entrenchment increases, power becomes more personalized, the leader’s discretion over major decisions expands, and extreme options — from wars to abrupt strategic shifts — become more politically survivable. This does not mean that longer tenure always produces aggression, but it does make high-risk options more viable. Therefore, if leader entrenchment over time is not considered, it can mislead risk estimates.

This is what happened in the run-up to February 2022, when many analysts were trying to make sense of conflicting signals and ended up treating entrenchment as a backdrop rather than a central element within their risk assessment frameworks.

On the Eve of War

In the weeks leading up to Feb. 24, 2022, many analysts, think tanks, and political leaders believed that Russia was unlikely to launch a full-scale invasion. Reuters reported that it “spoke to more than a dozen sources, including Western intelligence officials and Russians familiar with Kremlin thinking, and nearly all agreed that an invasion is unlikely to be imminent.” In Foreign Policy, Eugene Chausovsky argued that “Past attacks suggest Moscow probably won’t move on Ukraine,” while Jeff Hawn urged readers to “Stop Panicking About Ukraine—and Putin.” In the Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter, Alexey Muraviev contended that “2022 is not 2014: What holds back Russia from Ukraine.” While some analysts and officials warned of a possible invasion, public commentary largely leaned the other way.

This wasn’t limited to English-language coverage. A piece in the Dutch outlet Trouw called a large-scale invasion “onwaarschijnlijk” — improbable. Even Turkish leadership — close to both sides to the point that it was selling weapons to one and buying from the other, and later became a mediator between the two — described talk of invasion as not “gerçekçi bir yaklaşım” (a realistic approach). Similarly, the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell later said, “We did not believe that the war was coming.” In fact, even Ukrainian officials themselves downplayed the risk. Only three days before the invasion, Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said that a Russian attack wasn’t imminent, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made similar predictions. On the Russian side, the Moscow Times likewise reported “Russia Unlikely to Invade Ukraine Despite Ratcheting Tensions, Experts Believe.”

This was not a result of naivete, of course. Instead, it reflected a reasonable starting assumption that political pressures usually channel state leaders toward roughly similar decisions. All leaders must balance domestic responsibilities with international issues. In many systems, this leaves relatively little freedom to choose very risky options, even if a leader might personally want to.

However, that assumption fails in some regimes. Russia — especially by the mid-2010s and even more so by 2022 — was one of those edge cases.

When the Usual Logic Doesn’t Hold

Selectorate theory proposes that leaders stay in power by keeping a “winning coalition” of key insiders on their side. The theory holds that a leader’s primary goal is to remain in power by rewarding loyalists and punishing defectors with state resources. In democracies, this coalition includes segments of voters, media, businesspeople, and senior officials, among others. In more authoritarian regimes, it shrinks toward security services, oligarchs, and regional bosses. Regardless of regime type, this coalition is a key internal constraint on leaders.

When a leader first comes to power, that constraint is tight. Losing even a handful of key supporters can tip the balance that keeps the leader in office, so their decisions are often strongly shaped by the coalition’s preferences. Coalition members themselves are typically risk-averse, preferring the status quo because they are unsure whether they would remain in the coalition if significant change occurred. This tends to make new leaders sensitive to short-term costs.

In response, leaders typically try to consolidate their position by reducing dependence on key supporters. They may replace some with staunch loyalists, build a network of potential substitutes, and change rules to weaken dissidents. However, consolidation takes time.

In Putin’s case, his long tenure allowed him to replace parts of the financial elite, reshape the security services and bureaucracy, and redesign election rules.

His background in the Russian intelligence services also mattered in how he achieved this. It gave him both the skillset to manage elites — know-how in surveillance, political patronage, and narrative control — and a pool of loyal security veterans and close associates from his St. Petersburg years to place into key posts in government and business. Over time, his close circle became increasingly composed of people drawn from these and similar networks.

As a result, the internal pressures on him steadily diminished, and, increasingly, the elites moved to align with him rather than the other way around. We have seen this effect repeatedly. An early on-camera example of elite subordination came in 2009, when Putin forced oligarch Oleg Deripaska to sign a supply contract, then called him back and said, “My pen—give it back.” By Feb. 21, 2022, the displays of dominance over the elites were even clearer. Senior officials were required to publicly endorse the recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk on live TV. Moments later, Putin signed the recognition decrees — a clear demonstration of who makes the decisions. This shift — from elites constraining Putin to Putin constraining the elites — raised Russia’s risk tolerance.

Of course, things did not suddenly fall into place for Putin in 2022. The process of consolidating power had been in the making for years. Moreover, in both Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, he had already undertaken smaller but significant military invasions. These operations damaged Russia’s relations with the West and specifically the United States but did not threaten Putin’s standing at home. The assault against Ukraine beginning in 2022 has been qualitatively different in terms of scale, duration, and political objectives.

Entrenched Control

Once a state leader solidifies their position by sidelining elites who could get in the way, the short-term price of failure falls while the executive core captures more of the upside from risky moves. In a nuclear power like Russia, external removal by force — “regime change” — is not a realistic constraint, as nuclear deterrence insulates the leader from outside coercion. Thus, with domestic elites under control, absorbing costs becomes easier while successes can be converted into additional power. As a result, a move that would appear irrational in systems with more autonomous domestic elites can become thinkable here, because the domestic penalties for failure — at least in the short term — are limited.

An important clarification here is that this logic does not assume Putin went into the war with a clear-eyed view of the costs and simply chose to bear them. A body of post-2022 analysis — including Mike Eckel’s piece in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Lawrence Freedman’s Substack essay, and a related War on the Rocks podcast episode — suggests that he misjudged both Russia’s military capacity and Ukraine’s resilience. The entrenchment argument presented here is consistent with that view rather than competing with it. In particular, an entrenched leader like Putin typically sits at the center of an echo chamber, as his subordinates and associates have strong incentives to flatter his views and filter out inconvenient information that might make them look bad in order to protect their place within the winning coalition. Entrenchment did not reduce the objective risks for Russia, but it did lower the personal and political costs Putin faced if the gamble went wrong and made it easier for his false optimism to survive unchallenged.

Before the full-scale invasion, analysts were dealing with a particularly ambiguous scenario, and many made their predictions based on calculations that did not fully consider this dynamic in Russia’s case. Even in cases where the analyst was a top expert on Russia and clearly understood that Putin was an entrenched leader, their pre-war analyses tended to treat this entrenchment more as background context than as a central variable, focusing instead on a standard state-level cost–benefit calculus. For example, two days before the invasion, Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote that “If direct acts of aggression by state militaries are increasingly rare—and increasingly shocking when they do happen—it’s because they increasingly fail to pass such basic cost-benefit tests.” Likewise, Freedman, a seasoned analyst and academic, later noted that he “was increasingly persuaded of [a full-scale Russian invasion’s] possibility, but it still seemed to be such a self-evidently stupid move that [he] assumed Putin had better options.” Andrei Kortunov — head of the Russian International Affairs Council — told the Moscow Times, “To be quite honest, I don’t see any grounds to expect an invasion … The losses would be huge, and the potential gains very limited.” Similarly, after the invasion began, some analysts argued that the United States and Europe could compel Putin to end the war by pressuring Russia’s financial elite. That logic makes sense so long as you assume Russia’s elites and population are driving Putin’s decisions, but it breaks down once you factor in that Putin is driving their decisions more than they are driving his.

This outcome mirrors a common pattern in corporate governance. For example, founder-CEOs with entrenched control (e.g., majority ownership) have more discretion to pursue riskier strategies than those who constantly need the support of a board and shareholders to remain in position. This does not imply that they will always take a higher risk. Rather, they are not structurally constrained to be risk-averse.

In Putin’s case, as a former KGB officer, he already held a longstanding worldview that Ukraine was integral to Russia. The discretion created by entrenchment, combined with confirmation-heavy intelligence from a dense network of loyalists around him, allowed that worldview to translate into a far riskier decision than many analysts — including many Russian analysts outside his inner circle — expected.

Beyond Russia

The core lesson that leader entrenchment matters is generalizable beyond the case of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on selectorate theory, we observe that the longer a leader remains in power — irrespective of regime type — the more opportunity there is for recomposing the “winning coalition,” weakening the coalition’s constraints on the leader. Consequently, such leaders can undertake longer-horizon, higher-risk ventures with less concern about being ousted for short-term failures. However, this does not mean that long-tenure leaders will automatically prefer high-risk options. Many entrenched leaders remain risk-averse or even grow more cautious as they age, prioritizing stability and the preservation of their status, whereas some short-tenured leaders may instead pursue risky endeavors, such as aggressive conflicts, to secure their position. The point here is that as power becomes consolidated over time due to entrenchment, extreme options — including those based on false optimism — become more thinkable and less likely to be blocked.

Analysts should incorporate leader tenure as one important indicator of leader entrenchment, alongside other factors such as media control and regular or large-scale elite purges. Specifically, in states with entrenched leaders, the conventional expectation that rational leaders avoid actions with severe short-term costs understates risk. Therefore, when evaluating states led by highly entrenched leaders — those who have consolidated power over extended tenures — analysts should adjust their risk assessments upward. In this sense, leader entrenchment is a potential risk multiplier: It increases a leader’s ability to take risks at lower personal cost. This applies to predicting wars, but also to other kinds of aggression, rapid escalations, and abrupt strategic realignments.

After all, the question is not just what a state’s interests are, but also who gets to define them.

Aybars Tuncdogan is an associate professor in digital innovation and information security at King’s College London. His research areas include behavioral strategy, information systems, and security. He has books with Oxford University Press, Routledge, and Edward Elgar, and his writing has appeared in venues including the Modern War Institute, Defence Strategic Communications, Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Management, Scientific American, and IEEE Security & Privacy.

Image: Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation via Wikimedia Commons