Former top officials say Putin being misled about progress of war as Russian advances in Ukraine slow

Vladimir Putin is becoming increasingly deluded about both the Russian military’s progress on the ground in Ukraine and the scale of its technological advances, according to two former senior Kremlin officials cited in a report by the Financial Times (FT) on Monday.

The assessment comes amid a slowing of Russian advances in Ukraine in recent weeks, with an overview of the situation published by the US-based Institute for the Study of War on 1 June concluding that Ukrainian forces had largely halted Russia’s spring-summer offensive, and that Russian forces gained only a fraction of the territory in May that they did in the same month last year.

One of the former officials told the FT that Putin’s perception of reality was being warped by receiving up to three briefings a day from Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, and accused Putin of attempting to micromanage the war effort in Ukraine.

“Putin’s very much under the influence of the military, who are really good at stringing him along”, the official said, adding: “He understands that, but he really believes them and lets them do it.”

Putin’s delusions about the state of Russia’s war effort, and its technological advances, could be seen at a meeting with Russian servicemen on 12 June, during which Putin was repeatedly asked when a Russian equivalent to Elon Musk's SpaceX Starlink satellite internet system would be developed.

To the “apparent bewilderment” of the servicemen, Putin replied that Russia already possessed such a system, and that it was “in no way inferior to Starlink, perhaps even superior in some ways”. In fact, the Russian Rassvet satellite internet project launched its first 16 satellites in March, and is not yet operational. By comparison, over 10,200 satellites are currently used by SpaceX to run Starlink.

Military experts interviewed by FT said that Russia was increasingly lagging behind Ukraine’s technological capabilities, especially in the field of drone warfare. According to one expert, Russia’s elite Rubikon drone unit has failed to match Ukraine’s massive expansion of “middle-range” drone strikes.

One anonymous source told the FT that “the Russian state is either struggling to find belated answers to the enemy’s innovative new solutions or not finding them at all”, concluding: “Raising the level of mobilising human, industrial and economic resources is the only way out. The question is what form it takes and how they dress it up.”