Russian President Vladimir Putin’s advisers misinformed him about their military struggles in the war with Ukraine, declassified US intelligence reportedly indicates.
Putin is getting overly optimistic reports about Russian forces’ advance in Ukraine, or incomplete reports, unnamed US officials told The New York Times.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken acknowledged that Putin’s advisers have not provided him with the full truth.
‘With regard to President Putin, look, what I can tell you is this, and I said this before, one of the Achilles’ heel of autocracies is that you don’t have people in those systems who speak truth to power or who have the ability to speak truth to power,’ Blinken said from Algiers.
‘And I think that is something that we’re seeing in Russia.’
Putin appeared unaware that Russian forces were using conscripts in Ukraine and that drafted soldiers were killed in the conflict, US officials reportedly said. Putin’s ignorance reflected ‘a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president’, an official who accessed the declassified material said, adding there ‘is now persistent tension’ between Putin and the Ministry of Defense.
The intelligence suggests growing tension between Putin and the Defense Ministry as well as Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu, several US officials told The Times. Shoigu was one of Putin’s most trusted members in his inner circle.
Putin also appeared to lack full understanding on the damage that Western sanctions have inflicted on Russia’s economy, the US officials said.
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