Putin’s closest allies ‘may be too scared to tell him truth about disastrous Ukraine invasion’ say Western officials

Western officials say there is ‘considerable evidence of unease’ about how the conflict has gone for Russia among the elite in Moscow

Vladimir Putin’s closest allies in the Kremlin may to be too terrified to tell him the truth about his “fairly disastrous” invasion of Ukraine, Western officials said on Tuesday.

They added that there is “considerable evidence of unease” about how the conflict has gone for Russia among the elite in Moscow and that a “blame game” is likely to have now erupted in the “Russian system”.

There is also believed to be “self reflection in the intelligence services that they misjudged catastrophically” how Ukraine and its people would respond to the invasion.

It is creating a “sense of Ukrainian sacrifice and nationhood and an unwillingness to submit to Russia which will last for generations probably and will make this country impossible to subdue for Russia,” said one official.

However, doubts remain over whether Mr Putin is actually being told how many Russian soldiers are being killed, that his troops have been forced to pull back from some areas close to Kyiv, and that they have only managed to capture one major city, Kherson, which they may be struggling to hold onto as Ukrainian forces fight back.

Asked about what people in the Kremlin were telling the Russian president, one Western official said: “Even if they were capable of influencing him, would they be prepared to tell him the truth about the fairly disastrous progress of his campaign?

“I think we are much less certain that he is getting an honest picture on the ground.”

He stressed that was why western and Ukrainian media was important so the Russian leadership, including the president, know how badly his military campaign is going, including the heavy losses, with more than 10,000 Russian soldiers killed, according to some reports.

Russia-Ukraine Crisis: Mariupol shelling

Service members of pro-Russian troops are seen in the besieged city of Mariupol
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Another official stressed: “It’s also likely that within the Russian system various elements are going to be blaming each other for the lack of success so that is going to also complicate the challenge for the truth getting through because people will be being quite defensive about their own failures and looking to point the finger at others.”

Mystery still surrounds the fate of Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu who disappeared from public sight for a number of days, amid rumours Mr Putin was blaming him for the invasion stalling, but them made a fleeting appearance in video footage of a meeting with the president, with some suggestions though that it may have been faked.

A report in The Times on Tuesday said investigators believe he is actually in a nuclear bunker in the Ural mountains, which would suggest he may still be playing a major role in the invasion as its strategy has been changed to focus on eastern Ukraine after the failure to seize the capital Kyiv within days.

One western official said there were now “some indications of reflection” on what had gone wrong.

“We are seeing it in two ways. The first is who’s to blame for this? I think between agencies and between levels so people blaming other organisations or blaming other levels of command,” he explained.

“And we’ve seen a number of commanders at a variety of levels being removed. We have seen some being killed obviously and having to be replaced.”

He added: “The challenge for them...is a force which was meant to have been modernised over the last ten years has not been able to operate in the way they had exercise planned and assumed that they could. And we are now back into that strategy of attrition and the learning of this will probably take considerable time for them to adapt and change.

“There are obviously signs of self reflection in the military that they have not performed well. There is equally quite a lot of self reflection in the intelligence services that they misjudged catastrophically the Ukrainian national mood and to the extent they got it right they didn’t communicate it properly.”

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