Russia and Ukraine

[Fake Messiah]

Financial Times reports how Russian generals regularly lie to Putin and have thus convinced him that he will soon win the war. This is the main reason why he is rejecting favorable terms proposed by Trump and refusing to sign a peace deal.

How upbeat battlefield briefings are fuelling Putin’s confidence

Colonel-General Sergei Kuzovlev, a large, grey-haired man in his late 50s, told Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in late November that his troops had “completed the liberation of Kupiansk”, a small but strategically important town in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.

Putin later awarded him the Gold Star medal, Russia’s highest military honour.

Yet just three days after the ceremony, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted a video of himself standing in front of a boundary marker at the entrance to Kupiansk. “I went to Kupiansk myself to show the world that Putin is lying,” he said. Independent assessments say Russia has not fully controlled the town since early 2022.

The competing claims over Kupiansk, coupled with Putin’s visible confidence in Russia’s battlefield prospects, have once again raised questions about whether the country’s top brass are massaging facts to tell the president what he wants to hear.

Putin has pressed on with the war effort despite seemingly favourable peace terms offered by Donald Trump — a decision that western officials believe has been influenced by the flawed information reaching the Kremlin.

Russia’s military and security services give Putin regular updates that inflate Ukraine’s casualty numbers, stress the country’s resource advantages, and play down tactical failures, two officials said.

Though Putin also regularly meets with confidants who explain to him how the war has become a growing drag on Moscow’s sputtering economy, the rosy picture painted in the military briefings has nonetheless led him to believe he can win the war outright, they added.

JD Vance alluded to that dynamic in October, when the US vice-president spoke of “a fundamental misalignment of expectations [ . . .] where the Russians tend to think that they’re doing better on the battlefield than they actually are”. Vance said that had made a deal harder to reach.

Still, Russia’s disinformation campaign has reached external audiences, doing a “very good job” of convincing “most people around Trump that it is winning swiftly”, said Keir Giles, a Russia expert at Chatham House.

The main figure tasked with briefing Putin about the war is Valery Gerasimov, chief of Russia’s general staff and the invasion’s lead commander.

Gerasimov, egged on by reports that Ukraine would not resist, presided over Russia’s initial blitzkrieg on Kyiv in 2022 — a disastrous failure that ended in a humiliating retreat a month later.

As the war dragged on, he and then-defence minister Sergei Shoigu became the target of ire from hardline war supporters who accused them of shielding Putin from reality and relying on “meat grinder” tactics that drove high casualties.

The most telling case was the full-scale invasion of Ukraine itself, which Putin hoped would be over within days but has instead dragged on for nearly four years.

In August 2024, Gerasimov told Putin that Russia had halted Ukrainian advances in the Kursk region, even as Ukrainian troops had already seized parts of the territory — triggering chaotic evacuations that cost some civilians their lives.

It now also helps explain why Russia continues to press ahead at enormous cost instead of pocketing the gains offered through ceasefire settlements, Giles added.

Putin appeared to address public anger by replacing Shoigu as defence minister in 2024, which preceded a sweeping purge of top military figures in corruption cases.

While Putin’s reliance on flawed information has long plagued Russia’s military operations, few cases have sparked as much fury among war supporters as Kupiansk, prompting an unusual wave of criticism from Russia’s military Z-bloggers on Telegram.

“It’s simply laughable how we are trying to counter yet another video of Zelenskyy standing by the Kupiansk marker with our own clips,” wrote Starshe Eddy, a popular blogger. Rybar, one of the most prominent of Z-bloggers, has sarcastically referred to the city as “Schrödinger’s Kupiansk”. He rebuked exaggerating frontline successes, saying the price of such “territories taken on credit” was soldiers’ lives.

But Putin appears to have concluded those lives are a price worth paying for his goals in Ukraine, Massicot said.

https://www.ft.com/content/06e0b154-1f15...6fd715f766