war against Ukraine
Secret services: Putin misinformed by advisers
Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in Moscow. Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/Pool Sputnik Kremlin/AP/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
How comprehensive is the Russian President’s knowledge of the situation in Ukraine? Western secret services suspect that Putin’s advisers are hiding the truth out of fear.
According to Western secret services, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been misinformed about the situation in Ukraine.
GCHQ chief Jeremy Fleming said on a visit to Australia that Putin’s advisors are afraid to tell him the truth. Nevertheless, the extent of the misjudgments must be clear to the Kremlin. The US government had previously made similar statements.
In Washington, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield, citing intelligence information, said Putin felt deceived by the Russian military. This causes ongoing tensions between the Kremlin boss and the military leadership. US Defense Department spokesman John Kirby said there was concern if Putin was misinformed or uninformed about what was happening in Ukraine.
Fleming said in Canberra that Russian forces were deeply demoralized. “We have seen Russian soldiers – short of weapons and morale – refusing to obey orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own plane.” There are logistical errors, many Russian casualties and chaos within the military leadership. “We saw how Putin lied to his own people to hide military incompetence,” Fleming said in his speech at the Australian National University, which Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) published on Thursday night.
Make up for mistakes with even more hardness
Putin underestimated both the resistance of the Ukrainians and the unity of the West and the consequences of the sanctions. “He overestimated his military’s ability to achieve a quick victory.”
Now Putin is trying to make up for the mistakes with even more severity, also in Russia itself, said Fleming. “It seeks brutal control over media and internet access, it seeks to stifle the voices of the opposition, and it invests heavily in propaganda and covert activities.”
Fleming said it was fully intentional for Western intelligence agencies to release a great deal of information. This is to ensure that the truth is heard, said the head of the agency. British and US secret services in particular had warned of an attack with rare openness before the Russian invasion began and have been publishing information regularly since the beginning of the war.