Putin being lied to by own advisers: US defense official
Russian President Vladimir Putin is being misled by advisers and doesn’t know how badly his own war is going, a US defense official said on Wednesday.
The struggling strongman is being lied to by his inner circle about everything from military losses to the economy, an unnamed US official said, citing recently declassified intelligence.
US intelligence suggests that Putin was unaware of the extent to which his army was relying on — and losing — conscripted soldiers, the official told The Associated Press. The Russian leader has also been given an unrealistically rosy assessment of Russian markets as his advisers downplay the effect of Western sanctions on their economy.
The official said Putin is now aware he’s being misled, which is causing tension between the president and his top military officials.
There’s a “clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information” to Putin, the official said, and the Russian president’s senior advisers are “afraid to tell him the truth.”
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby did not provide any further details on Wednesday, but he said the Defense Department agreed with the intelligence assessment.
“It’s his military — it’s his war, he chose it,” Kirby said of Putin. “The fact that he may not have all the context, that he may not fully understand the degree to which his forces are failing in Ukraine, that’s a little discomforting.”
“If he’s not fully informed of how poorly he’s doing, then how are his negotiators going to come up with an agreement that is enduring, or one that respects Ukrainian sovereignty?
“You don’t know how a leader like that is going to react to getting bad news,” he added. “It’s disconcerting.”
US officials did not provide any underlying evidence for the contention that Putin is being misled.
The news came as:
- Russian troops began to withdraw from the defunct Chernobyl nuclear facility. The site, which was taken on the first day of the invasion, is 10 miles from the Belarusian border, where US officials believe Russian troops may be going for a refit and resupply.
- President Biden pledged another $500 million in direct aid to Ukraine on Wednesday.
- Slovakia has joined the ranks of European powers expelling Russian diplomats — or spies working under diplomatic cover. The nation’s foreign minister announced Wednesday that it was scaling back the size of Russia’s diplomatic mission by 35 people.
- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Western nations shouldn’t lift sanctions on Russia until all of Moscow’s troops have left Ukraine. Johnson said a cease-fire would not be enough, and the G-7 should “intensify sanctions with a rolling program until every single one of [Putin’s] troops is out of Ukraine.”
- Putin told his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that the shelling of besieged port city Mariupol will end only when Ukrainian troops surrender. The Pentagon said Wednesday that it believed Russian troops were getting close to the city center.
- The UN human rights chief says her office is looking into allegations that some residents of Mariupol have been forcibly evacuated to areas controlled by Russian forces or to Russia itself.
- Russian forces struck a Red Cross facility in Mariupol, Ukraine has claimed.
- Ramzan Kadyrov, the Prada-wearing alleged war criminal at the head of Russia’s republic of Chechnya, said on Wednesday that Moscow would make no concessions in its war in Ukraine.
Russian forces continued to attack the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv and Chernihiv early Wednesday as a small number of Russian units withdrew — mere hours after Moscow pledged to “increase mutual trust” by de-escalating its military presence around those same cities.
A round of Russian shelling hit a slew of civilian sites, including residential areas and at least one library, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday. The attacks came, alongside renewed Russian aggression in the eastern Donbas region.
Russia claimed on Tuesday that it would “radically” reduce its attacks around Kyiv and Chernihiv as a goodwill gesture amid the peace talks recently convened in Istanbul. But overnight, civilian infrastructure was targeted, said Viacheslav Chaus, regional governor of the Chernihiv Oblast.
“Given that the talks on the preparation of an agreement on the neutrality and non-nuclear status of Ukraine have moved into a practical field … a decision has been made to radically, by several times, reduce the military activity in the areas of Kyiv and Chernihiv,” Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin had said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky replied Tuesday, “you can trust only concrete results.”
“The so-called reduction of activity in the Chernihiv region was demonstrated by the enemy strikes, including airstrikes on Nizhyn, and all night long they were shelling Chernihiv,” Chaus said.
He said homes, shopping centers and libraries were hit in the attack.
Ukrainian officials said Russian forces also continued to shell the Bucha, Brovary and Vyshhorod regions around Kyiv, targeting civilian infrastructure.
The Pentagon said Wednesday that Russia had pulled fewer than 20% of its forces away from the two northern city centers, with the remainder continuing to hold defensive positions.
Defense spokesman John Kirby said a small number of units were headed north toward Belarus, where the American officials expect they will be refitted and resupplied before being deployed elsewhere in Ukraine.
“We have seen none of them repositioned to their home garrison,” Kirby said. “And that’s not a small point.”
“If the Russians were really serious about deescalating — the way they spun this yesterday, that they’re trying to take the pressure off — well then send them home,” Kirby said.
Meanwhile, Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk — a contested city in the eastern Donbas region — claimed a Ukrainian missile destroyed part of an apartment block, killing two.
The Kremlin has said it plans to focus future operations on the Donbas. The Pentagon said Wednesday that it believes 1,000 mercenaries with Russia’s ruthless Wagner Group have already been dedicated to the separatist region.
Fighting continued in the battered southern port of Mariupol as well, on Wednesday, with the Pentagon assessing that Russian troops were getting close to the city center.
As negotiations continued, Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said that Ukraine’s offer of formal neutrality and a pledge to not join NATO met a key Kremlin demand, moving peace talks forward.
Zelensky’s office clarified Wednesday that any peace offer would not be put to a vote of the Ukrainian people until all Russian forces withdrew to their pre-invasion positions.
