To be fair to Wolf, everyone got it wrong.
In the run-up to Russia’s February 2022 invasion, many doubted it would happen. And when it did, the wide consensus was that Ukraine’s military would be routed, Kyiv would be captured in days, the government would fall. None of that occurred – not even close. Why were so many people so wrong?
www.rferl.org
View: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/19/1158194914/why-most-predictions-about-the-ukraine-war-have-been-proved-wrong
Vladimir Putin hoped his invasion of Ukraine would result in a quick and historic victory. Instead, he ends 2022 with Russia's reputation as a military superpower in tatters. Why has the invasion of Ukraine gone so badly wrong?
www.atlanticcouncil.org
www.rferl.org
Just to quote from the first link.
"Reportedly, some US intelligence officials had expected that Kyiv would fall within days and the war would end after a few weeks, based on the assumption of strong Russian military capabilities that far outmatched those of Ukraine (Toosi and Seligman
Citation2022). What the world witnessed instead was blunder after blunder as poorly organized and ill-equipped troops attempted an ill-fated push toward Kyiv, incurring high losses of kit and personnel on the way. As the former NATO secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, admitted in June 2022, “We have overestimated the strength of the Russian military” (quoted in Agrawal
Citation2022). Questions started being asked about why the West had got this so wrong. “Some may wonder,” two observers pointedly noted, “if this is really the same Russian military that had been feared around the world for decades?” (Posard and Holynska
Citation2022). Another observer asked, “When it comes to functional military power, is Russia a paper tiger?” (Osborn
Citation2022)."
"Eliot Cohen (
Citation2022) argued that “most professional scholars of the Russian military … predicted a quick and decisive victory,” a sentiment that Taras Kuzio (
Citation2022) supported: “most Western experts on the Russian military agreed with the Kremlin that it had a powerful army that could defeat Ukraine within two or three days.”
And so on.