In recent days, Western officials have sketched a remarkable portrait of the war.
In Australia on Monday, one of Britain’s top spy chiefs, Jeremy Fleming, said that Putin had “massively misjudged” the war, the resistance of the Ukrainian people and his own military’s capacity, and had been poorly served by his subordinates.
“We’ve seen Russian soldiers — short of weapons and morale — refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft,” said Fleming, who heads GCHQ, the UK’s equivalent of the National Security Agency. Fleming’s frankness was extraordinary coming from a leading espionage agency chief. But it is being mirrored in the United States where there were new reports on Wednesday that opened a window into the war and Putin’s inner circle.
An official told CNN’s Jeremy Diamond that Putin is being “misinformed” by advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing and the impact of sanctions on the Russian economy. \White House communications director Kate Bedingfield then said on camera that the Russian leader’s advisers were “too afraid to tell him the truth.” She said there was now a “persistent tension” between Putin and his military leadership.
On Wednesday, this new stream of declassified assessments made headlines. On Thursday, President Joe Biden was asked about them in a public setting, as officials presumably knew he would be. The sequence gave the President the chance to further amplify the US narrative.
