THREAD 1/8 The secrecy of preparations for the Russian military invasion was detrimental to the expertise obtained when making decisions.
2/8 If you can’t ask experts direct questions & openly discuss the answers with the competent people, you inevitably get a distorted picture of reality.
3/8 Russia’s leader is used to acting as though within a covert special operation, but there comes a time when secrecy stops being helpful even to its adepts.
4/8 This is on top of the fact that in a system like Russia’s, it’s simply a lot easier to give the answer that confirms the boss’s views.
5/8 Those who were asked didn’t really believe that the leadership would actually send in the army— certainly on such a scale—so they encouraged it.
6/8 At the same time, there had long been many open discussions by the competent people on various platforms about how this could all turn out. But in a world where secrecy is a synonym for seriousness, discussions & publications on open platforms weren’t taken seriously.
7/8 The Russian leader couldn’t openly discuss sending troops into Ukraine on a large scale with a broad enough circle of people to be able to make the right decision: even with military experts, not to mention economists.
8/8 And so, naturally he saw his own impressions of reality reflected back to him, rather than reality itself: a mirror rather than a window. The secrecy has facilitated the terrible decision.
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