Kremlin suddenly admits: most political elite in Russia were kept in the dark about invasion of Ukraine | War Ukraine and Russia

Dmitry Peskov’s statement was prompted by the coverage of Bellingcat, a network of citizen investigative journalism specializing in fact-checking and Open Source Intelligence (the collection and analysis of data obtained from publicly available sources). He allegedly wrote that even Putin’s closest friends did not have accurate information about the start of the “special military operation” in Ukraine (something Bellingcat itself denies having published).

Peskov said Bellingcat’s publications should be seen through “special filters”, “sometimes with a sense of humor and sometimes as a deliberate lie and distortion of reality”. After which he seemed to admit in the same breath what he thought had been written by Bellingcat.

“As you understand, information about a special military operation cannot, of course, be widely disseminated on the eve of the launch of this operation. That’s why, of course, such classified information is always introduced to a very, very narrow circle of people. That is absolutely normal practice,” it suddenly sounded. And Peskov added that “the essence of the operation is not a wide dissemination of information about it”.

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