The Dutch intelligence services were convinced that Russia would not invade Ukraine based on a source inside Putin’s inner circle, according to the Volkskrant.
The newspaper spoke to 19 security and other officials who say the AIVD and MIVD were convinced the Russian military build-up on the border with Belarus and Ukraine was a tactic to put pressure on the west.
On February 22, 2022, the directors of the Dutch domestic intelligence service AIVD and the military intelligence service MIVD briefed top officials, including then prime minister Mark Rutte.
In contrast to what the US had been saying for months, Erik Akerboom and Jan Swillens told the group that they believed there would be no invasion.
Two days later, tanks rolled over the border into Ukraine, kicking off four years of war.
“This is the biggest war on European soil since the Second World War. And we didn’t see it coming. What a fuck-up,” one anonymous official told the Volkskrant.
According to the Volkskrant, the Dutch were sceptical of the Americans’ assessment of the risk of war after the US lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Months earlier, the Dutch ambassador to Ukraine Jennes de Mol had already begun to prepare for the invasion. “At the embassy we’d actually been preparing for a possible Russian invasion since November 29 2021, when we received reports of 120,000 battle-ready Russian troops amassing at the border,” he said in 2023.
Weeks before the invasion de Mol called on Dutch citizens to leave the country and evacuated his own family.
