Google "Putin miscalculation" and you get more than a trillion hits. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine turned catastrophic for both Vladimir Putin's ambitions and the Ukrainian people, many have suggested that the Russian president's miscalculation is the result self-isolation and listening only to a shrinking handful of yes-men, a pattern that's common in personalist autocratic regimes where power is concentrated in a single individual.
On Feb. 4, well before it was clear that Putin had decided to invade, much less how badly it would go, Adam Casey and Seva Gunitsky laid out the argument in a Foreign Affairs article entitled "The Bully in the Bubble," arguing that Putin had fallen prey to "information isolation" and warning that "if he makes a miscalculation and launches a major invasion, it will likely be because of the personalist features of his regime." The authors specifically cited U.S. intelligence reports that Putin was "underestimating the costs of invading Ukraine because his advisers are withholding information about the depth of local Ukrainian opposition to Russia and, relatedly, the strength of Ukraine's resistance."
