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Shashank Joshi Profile picture
@shashj
Dec 16, 2022 • 16 tweets • 13 min read • Read on X
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This time last year I was wondering whether Putin would torpedo Christmas. He didn't. But our first cover of 2022 was my story on NATO-Russia talks and Putin's demands. We warned he might go to war if he felt the alternative was a war on worse terms later. economist.com/briefing/2022/…
Our next Russia cover came on Jan 29. Putin "is...increasingly isolated and may be ill-informed on some things, such as the economic impacts," we wrote. "He may have lost sight of the big picture—or he may think he sees a bigger picture than anyone else." economist.com/briefing/2022/…
Then came "Putin's botched job" on Feb 17th. "In recent conversations with The Economist businesspeople, diplomats, economists and government officials in Moscow revealed that they could barely fathom the ruinous consequences a war would bring to Russia" economist.com/briefing/2022/…
At dawn on Feb 24th, Thursday, the day @TheEconomist is printed, we ripped up our planned cover story & wrote a new one in hours. "Wars in Europe rarely start on a Wednesday," Russia's envoy to the EU had said on Feb 16th. And indeed it wasn't a Wednesday. economist.com/briefing/2022/…
The most compelling cover of the year came on March 5th. Zelensky "has made an astonishingly rapid transformation from hapless political outsider to wartime hero", we wrote. In the same piece I wrongly anticipated that Kyiv would likely be encircled. economist.com/briefing/2022/…
On March 12th we warned of the Stalinisation of Russia under Putin's war. "In political and social terms it may be necessary to go back almost a century to find a parallel: to 1929, when Stalin liquidated the entrepreneurial class to consolidate his power" economist.com/leaders/2022/0…
In that March 5th issue we also reflected on the oft-made but imperfect comparisons to the Soviet-Finnish Winter war of 1939-40. "Stalin’s army was far larger than Mr Putin’s & it did not have to reckon with urban warfare. It also enjoyed support at home." economist.com/briefing/2022/…
Our April 1st cover was an interview with Zelensky. He divided NATO members into five camps, including those who wanted a long war "at the cost of Ukrainian lives", those who wanted to go back to trading with Russia & those who “recognise Nazism in Russia”
economist.com/briefing/2022/…
Our Apr 30 cover was my story on the root causes of Russian military failure: bad plan, bad army or both? I quoted an internal assessment by a European country: "The reputation of the Russian military has been battered & will take a generation to recover" economist.com/briefing/how-d…
On June 2nd I looked at the nuclear aspects of the conflict. “The value of nuclear weapons as a tool of statecraft hinges on the outcome of this war”—@mbudjeryn (author of a new book on the Soviet nukes left in Ukraine in 1991: press.jhu.edu/books/title/12…) economist.com/briefing/2022/…
By late June Russia's Donbas offensive had run out of steam and it was apparent this would be a long war. At that time Western officials were worried Ukraine would be profligate with HIMARS. In fact Ukraine quickly proved adept at the "deep battle".
economist.com/briefing/2022/…
On September 15th our cover reflected Ukraine's stunning gains in Kharkiv. "It shows that Ukraine is capable of fast, complex and daring attacks," wrote @olliecarroll (from Izyum) & I, "that Russia can be dislodged; and that Ukraine can therefore win".
economist.com/europe/2022/09…
In November our cover story, led by @AntonLaGuardia, looked at thinking around endgames. "In private, Western and Ukrainian officials are starting to ponder what a stable outcome might look like...A much-discussed template is Israel." economist.com/briefing/2022/…
And that brings us to this week's cover: a survey of how the war looks through the eyes of Zelensky and his top generals, based on interviews with the president, his commander-in-chief and the commander of ground forces. economist.com/ukraines-fatef…
Thanks to brilliant co-writers @ArkadyOstrovsky, @olliecarroll & @AntonLaGuardia. Others (@timjudah1, @p_zalewski, @Wendell23, @mattsteinglass, @richardjensor) who did great reporting from Ukraine. And peerless editors (notably @EWRCarr, @chrislockwd, @Eaterofsun, @robertguest1).
That list is a partial one. But, finally, I want to say thank you to @MartaRodionova, who helped @olliecarroll & others produce much of our coverage in Ukraine. 🙏🏽

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More from @shashj

Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Oct 1
"military assessments seen by the FT show that Yantar was one of several Russian naval vessels that congregated in UK waters for 13 months of sustained surveillance around nodes of critical infrastructure starting in the autumn of 2023." ft.com/content/0b3510…
"adversaries could interfere with the timing signals in underwater communication cables by altering the frequency of pulses passing through them — causing severe disruption in time-sensitive industries such as high-frequency trading." ft.com/content/0b3510…
AIS/radar analysis "suggests that this vessel [Yantar] was stationary for several hours in a small stretch of sea containing three major cables — the CeltixConnect-2, Geo-Eirgrid and Rockabill—all of which are data connections linking Ireland with the UK." ft.com/content/0b3510…
Read 4 tweets
Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Aug 30
Some defence stories in this week’s @TheEconomist. First, we looked at Ukraine’s new cruise missile. ‘Production…at least partially carried out abroad, but “over 90%”, the company says, of final assembly is in secret sites dispersed throughout Ukraine’
economist.com/europe/2025/08…
We reported on the Wagner group’s meltdown in Mali. “Murdering ordinary Malians, it turns out, is a bad way to win over ordinary Malians. Informants have dried up.” economist.com/middle-east-an…
We examined the US naval buildup in the Caribbean & whether it’s really for counter-narcotic purposes. ‘This “looks just right to scare the daylights out of Maduro’s supporters”, says Evan Ellis of the US Army War College.’ economist.com/the-americas/2…
Read 8 tweets
Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Jul 22
🧵 I've been writing something on the intelligence & national-security applications of frontier AI models. This is an experiment in seeing what one of them, OpenAI's o3-pro model, might be able to do in an area relevant to national security.
I fed the model this chart, explaining that it was the manoeuvre history of a satellite (though not sure I even needed to do that). Could it identify the satellite? Yes, after reasoning for 22 minutes and 23 seconds, it could indeed. Image
o3-pro identified the two large east-west & minimal north-south movements as distinctive signatures of Russia's Luch-5X satellite. It reasoned by elimination: "No other GEO spacecraft executed delta‑V’s of that magnitude (tens of m s‑¹) in exactly those two windows." Image
Read 12 tweets
Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Jul 7
Good account of a KGB "dangle" to the CIA in the cold war. "GTPROLOGUE exemplifies CIA’s troubled experience with hostile double agents during the 1980s, when a few select services—particularly the Soviets, East Germans & Cubans—badly burned the agency." cia.gov/resources/csi/…
"The ‘85–86 losses [due to Ames], as they became colloquially known within CIA, also signaled the need for a major KGB undertaking to deceive CIA as to the real reason for these losses. A multichannel KGB disinformation campaign, which operated from at least 1986, was launched" cia.gov/resources/csi/…Image
"Within the KGB, the Soviet preoccupation with secrecy fostered an institutional bias against release of the sort of valid feed typically required to establish the credibility of a deception channel." cia.gov/resources/csi/…Image
Image
Read 5 tweets
Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Jun 24
Important. "The US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US [DIA] intelligence assessment" edition.cnn.com/2025/06/24/pol…
Wow. 'Two of the people familiar w/ the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. One of the people said the centrifuges are largely “intact.” “...the (DIA) assessment is that the US set them back maybe a few months, tops”...' edition.cnn.com/2025/06/24/pol…
And a caveat. "It is still early for the US to have a comprehensive picture of the impact of the strikes, and none of the sources described how the DIA assessment compares to the view of other agencies in the intelligence community." edition.cnn.com/2025/06/24/pol…
Read 4 tweets
Shashank Joshi Profile picture
Jun 22
Pentagon briefing: “I know that battle damage is of great interest. Final battle damage will take some time, but initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction.”
Pentagon briefing: “In total, US forces employed approximately 75 precision guided weapons during this operation. This included, as the President stated last night, 14 30,000 pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance penetrators, marking the first ever operational use of this weapon.”
Pentagon briefing: “our initial assessment… is that all of our precision munitions struck where we wanted them to strike and had the desired effect, which means especially in Fordo, which was the primary target here, we believe we achieved destruction of capabilities there”
Read 10 tweets

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