Can Putin, locked in a bubble of bad intel, spin his way out of disaster?

Colonel General Gennady Zhidko is being reappointed to command Russia's Eastern Military District. One pro-Russian Telegram user has claimed that the general and others have created "a wall of lies...a sea of blood and a swamp of corpses."

That wall of lies has for many months encircled the Kremlin.

Yet, in the world of geopolitics, the truth is sometimes so overwhelming that there is nothing to do but face and accept it. Vladimir Putin should by all accounts be facing a truth precisely that overwhelming.

But it's hard to know what he really thinks because we have no real idea what he knows.

It seems ridiculous that a person in such power might not have a decent grasp of reality, but there is good evidence to think that Putin doesn't even know what you or I know about what is going on in Ukraine now, and what was going on before he decided to invade. Donald Trump, as US President, was famous for not reading or even eventually accepting delivery of daily briefs. But what Trump did at least have access to was the internet, even if only for continued tirades on Twitter.

Putin, on the other hand, is famous for not having a smartphone and being paranoid and extremely suspicious of the internet, once calling it a "CIA project" and a “tool of Western power projection.” As Lizzie O'Leary says in Slate, "As Vladimir Putin sees it, the very architecture of the world wide web is threatening. What he would prefer is a domestic internet: One that could control all information within Russia’s borders."

In 2019, Putin and the Russian government signed into legislation an attempt to create a Russian domestic internet, with its own Domain Name System (DNS), protocols, and infrastructure. This was about controlling the narrative. For Putin, information is the key to power.

For a recent example of how Russia has been able to control the narrative for its own people (though not for those with free access to Twitter), watch this fascinating comparison:

Unedited footage from Putin’s recent war rally in Moscow appears to show complete indifference among the captive crowd of bussed-in state workers. It seems propagandists added cheers and chants in the editing room. Is anything in Russia not faked? https://t.co/P8BOXEZh7b

— Business Ukraine mag (@Biz_Ukraine_Mag) October 3, 2022

The video shows the difference between the edited footage of the Moscow rally in support of the annexation of the four Ukrainian regions and actual footage recorded by attendees. People equipped with flags appear to have been bussed in to central Moscow to shout their support for the illegal annexation, but their own footage contradicts the impression broadcast on state television.

Such tight control of information is par for the course for authoritarian leaders. The problem for Putin is that he is victim of his self-made conspiracy theories and thus exists in a bubble of his own making, expanded by the fetid breath of deception and passed through the spittle of his own paranoia.

Without access to the internet, which provides at least some chance of fact-checking and truth-seeking, Putin is firmly in the hands of those reporting to him as to what he knows.

This presents a problem.

Nowhere has this issue been more evident than in the very basis of the war, the invasion of the sovereign nation of Ukraine. We know that the plans were for a two- to three-day lightning strike to depose the government and replace it with their own puppet show, with the Rosgvardia (internal security forces) mopping up any issues over the following fortnight. The plans took for granted that the Ukrainian people would welcome the Russian troops with open arms and bouquets of flowers.

This is what the troops were themselves told.

But that is not what happened. Now if you or I knew that this would never happen, that Ukraine would not roll over to have their belly rubbed, then there is something rotten in the center of Russian intelligence and the chain of information that leads to the very top.

The moral of the story: Good decisions depend on good information, and Putin is not being fed good information and has not been since before the war even started.

Garbage in, garbage out: If Putin is being fed wildly incorrect information, then he is liable to make wildly incorrect decisions.

Justin Bronk, Senior Research Fellow in the Military Sciences team at Royal United Services Institute, discussed as much with Times Radio, concerning the recent counter-offensive outcomes:

This is a point of desperation for President Putin. He has clearly been receiving, at best, filtered reports of how badly things have been going in Ukraine, clearly aware that they're not going well.... [T]he Russian system is essentially built on an acceptance of lying and massaging figures, whether it be monetary figures or reports at every level.... Unit commanders will report that a training exercise has been done, partly to pocket the money you would have spent on that training exercise, and in many cases ]they'll] just do basic things like pay for accommodation and food. But then the people higher up will also report that the exercise has been done, maybe pass on [other] photos instead of [ones of the] actual exercise, [and will] probably inflate the figures.

You're seeing the same at every level in Ukraine, where if the folks on the ground go forward and they don't make any progress and hey take a lot of casualties, that Russian unit commander will often report that the position was successfully either reached or taken and a couple of Ukrainian tanks were destroyed—let's say three or four tanks were destroyed—but then his superior will report that not only was the position taken but that ten tanks were destroyed, and there were "limited losses on our side."

And then you see that at every point up the chain, by the time it gets to the senior level, (a) their perspective on actually what the reality is on the frontlines for their own forces is probably fairly distorted, but (b) Putin is trying to walk an almost impossible tightrope between the various different factions within Russia that he needs to keep onside.

This takes on a parallel to the endemic corruption experienced at every level in the Russian armed forces. The problem for the Russian leadership is that they really must have a corrupted understanding of the reality of what is going on.

If Putin is being fed wildly incorrect information, then he is liable to make wildly incorrect decisions.

This issue is then compounded when you realize that the Russian army is famously a top-down organization, centralized to the point of their inability to be reactive on the field of battle in the absence of orders from far above.

NATO forces and doctrine used to train the Ukrainian armed forces since 2014, on the other hand, give accountability through enfranchising the non-commissioned officers—those lower down the hierarchy. Decision-making is not distorted by a lack of accurate information, since the information for these NCOS, in reacting to battlefield phenomena, is right in front of them.

The moral of the story: Good decisions depend on good information, and Putin is not being fed good information and has not been since before the war even started.

At some point, brittle structures of interconnected deceptions come tumbling down, buffeted by the winds of reality. Truth has a canny way of eventually winning out. For Putin, this must have happened recently. He must have had some moment when he realized that things just weren't going according to his best-laid plans. When your only options are mass mobilization or nuclear strikes, you know something is wrong.

Something is wrong.

The question: Can spin and misinformation save Putin and Russia from the precarious position that spin and misinformation have got them into in the first place?

[For daily Ukraine war updates, check out Jonathan MS Pearce's popular Ukraine War Update series on YouTube.]