Prisoners of disinformation

“Russian soldiers flout orders, sabotage their equipment and accidentally shoot down their own planes.” And Vladimir Putin does not know. Jeremy Fleming, director of the United Kingdom electronic espionage agency, made these statements during a speech in Canberra (Australia), early Thursday in Spain. With a profusion of details –unusual in a person in charge of the secret service– he contributed to support a thesis that he has been planning for days as a suspicion. And that in a kind of coordinated action confirmed both the White House and the Pentagon: the Russian president is uninformed.

It is true that no head of state knows all the details of a military campaign, but the central thesis of the West is that he lives in a parallel reality because his advisers are afraid of him and do not tell him the whole truth. And because the crack with its military leadership widens as a result of failure. Fear of explaining to the tenant of the Kremlin why the ‘lightning attack’ has mutated into a conventional war that has now lasted five weeks; why the clear predominance of his troops in the ‘related’ regions of Donbas has not been imposed; or why in all this time there is only one provincial capital under Russian control (Jerkov) while the withdrawal takes place in kyiv or the crushed Mariupol continues to resist. Fear of the truth.

“Your defense minister hasn’t briefed you on all the details for the last month,” said John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman. We enter the second hypothesis. And here the disappearance for two weeks of the foci – illogical in the middle of the invasion – of the aforementioned military high command, Sergei Shoigu, with a fleeting return just four days ago, is at the foundation of the central thesis spread by Washington and London. “We have information that Putin has felt cheated by the Russian military, which has resulted in persistent tension with his military leadership,” said White House spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield.

From there the argument comes into play. That the morale of the Russian army is not at its highest level, that it has suffered logistical problems for weeks and also some lack of coordination between the commands – with a loss of generals at a rate that has been considered unprecedented since the Second World War– It was evidenced in the audio messages that have been intercepted from the troops and that have been disseminated on social networks.

disturbing situation

So assuming that Moscow underestimated not only Ukraine’s ability to resist but also the West’s bloc response (military support, sanctions burden, isolation mechanisms), the argument that Putin would be living a daydream – he doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know– would be a fact. What disturbs. “If he has no information that things are going wrong, how will his negotiators reach an agreement? And, another thing, you don’t know how such a leader is going to react when he receives bad news », in the words of the Pentagon spokesman.

But, although hackneyed, it should be remembered:_information is one of the key ammunition in any war. And on all sides there are captives of disinformation. The Kremlin spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, took ‘zero point’ to attack Washington. “Neither the State Department nor the Pentagon have any real information about what is happening in the Kremlin. They just don’t get it.” And he drew (by chance) the same consequence: «It’s not just a pity. It causes concern.” Because “such a complete misunderstanding only leads to wrong decisions, unwise decisions that have very bad consequences.” The truth is polyhedral.