WSJ:n mukaan Putin saa suodatettua informaatiota kapealta joukolta:
Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow.
It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat. The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation, according to current and former U.S. and European officials and a former senior Russian intelligence officer briefed on the exchange
Mr. Putin wakes daily around 7 a.m. to a written briefing on the war, with information carefully calibrated to emphasize successes and play down setbacks, according to the former Russian intelligence officer and current and former Russian officials.
He has long refused to use the internet for fear of digital surveillance, Russian and U.S. officials have said, making him more dependent on briefing documents compiled by ideologically aligned advisers.
Battlefield updates can take several days to reach Mr. Putin’s desk, leaving them often out of date, people familiar with the matter said. Front-line commanders report to the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB, which edits reports for experts at the Security Council, who pass them to Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, the arch hawk who helped persuade Mr. Putin to invade Ukraine. He, in turn, passes the reports to Mr. Putin.
In July, as American-supplied, satellite-guided Himars rockets began to strike Russian army logistics depots, Mr. Putin summoned about 30 business leaders from defense companies to his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, according to people familiar with the meeting. After three days of quarantine and three PCR tests, the executives sat at the end of a long wooden table, listening as Mr. Putin described a war effort he considered a success.
Then Mr. Putin turned to Chief of General Staff for the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov, who said Russian weapons were successfully hitting their targets and the invasion was going according to plan. The arms makers left the meeting with a sense that Mr. Putin lacked a clear picture of the conflict, the people said.
In September, a coterie of Russian military journalists and bloggers—all stalwart backers of the war—met with the president for more than two hours and came away with the same impression, according to people familiar with the matter.
That month, Mr. Putin met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Uzbekistan, and speaking softly, assured him Russia had the war under control, people familiar with the meeting said.
To receive what he believes is raw information from the front, Mr. Putin has recruited four of the most popular pro-war voices on Russian social media, a mix of state TV journalists, war correspondents and pro-Kremlin propagandists who have been embedding with the army, according to people familiar with the matter. The influencers are tasked with helping a new Kremlin-run working group produce a monthly report on the progress of Russia’s troop mobilization, according to a presidential decree published on the Kremlin’s website this month.
“He probably forgot that when he was a KGB operative he was lying to his boss,” said Indrek Kannik, a former head of analysis for Estonian foreign intelligence.
“The seeds of Mr. Putin’s overconfidence against Kyiv were planted in 2014, when his most senior war planners advised him not to seize Crimea.”
