According to insiders, Putin is heading for a new fiasco in Ukraine: “No one dares to tell him the truth” | War Ukraine and Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin would be heading for another fiasco in neighboring Ukraine. This is evident from conversations that the business newspaper ‘Financial Times’ had with six confidants of the president, people involved in the invasion and high-ranking Ukrainian and Western officials. Putin would have a wrong picture of the situation because no one dares to tell him the truth. He would also become increasingly isolated.

Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine a year ago after consulting a handful of stalwarts. Even his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov knew nothing. The rest is history. His plans to take Kiev in a few days failed. What’s more, in the following months the Russian troops were pushed back considerably. They had to hand over half of the conquered territory and today still hold 17 percent of Ukrainian territory, in the southeast.

The number of Russian dead and wounded at the front had meanwhile risen to an estimated 200,000 and the supply of tanks, missiles and artillery was severely depleted. “Hundreds of thousands of people were not supposed to die,” said a former senior official. “It all went horribly wrong.”

“Mess”

Despite this, Putin does not seem to be planning to give up his plans for conquest. “He tells the people close to him that they were not well prepared a year ago and that the military and our industry are a mess. But it’s good that we discovered it this way and not in a NATO invasion,” he continues.

©AFP

Several confidants in Ukraine had told him prior to the invasion that the Ukrainians would welcome the Russian troops with open arms. The Russian secret service FSB confirmed that “because they always tell the boss what he wants to hear,” according to a Western intelligence source.

Putin was happy to believe it and brushed off the main Russian foreign intelligence service SVR and the General Staff who questioned this. He did the same with Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Russian Security Council and a longstanding ally of the president. “He knew the army was in bad shape and tried to tell Putin that,” a source close to the Kremlin said. However, Putin whistled him back, claiming he was better informed.

LOOK. Our expert Carolien van Nunen on the question of whether Putin still has the support of the Russians?

When it turned out that the invasion had effectively gone awry, Putin sought a scapegoat. That became Sergei Beseda, the head of the fifth directorate of the FSB. He had done the preparatory work for the invasion by paying Ukrainian collaborators, among other things, according to Western officials. He was placed under house arrest, but a few weeks later was back to normal at a meeting with the United States, as if nothing had happened.

“Beseda’s swift comeback demonstrated what advisers see as one of Putin’s greatest weaknesses. He values ​​loyalty over ability, is obsessed with secrecy, and leads a bureaucratic culture where his subordinates tell him what he wants to hear,” said people who know him.

“Not bad”

Another confidant emphasizes that the president is “not crazy”. “But nobody can be an expert in everything. They have to be honest with him and are not. The management system is a huge problem. It creates big gaps in his knowledge and the quality of the information he gets is poor.”

AP

© AP

For many people in high places, the lies are a survival strategy. They tell friends that they are actually against the war, but feel there is nothing they can do about it.

All this means that Putin has a wrong picture of the situation in Ukraine. According to sources close to the Kremlin, he thinks Russia is more committed to the war than the west is to Ukraine, and resilient enough to withstand economic sanctions. That’s why he just keeps going. It doesn’t help that his group of close faithful is getting smaller and smaller according to insiders because he trusts no one.


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