The Pentagon seems to be less certain than the White House about the intelligence claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin “is being misinformed by his own generals who are afraid to tell him the truth.” The senior defense official briefing reporters at the Pentagon yesterday, didn’t openly disagree with the White House statements—saying, instead, that the military hasn’t seen any “tangible outcomes” of Putin being misinformed. “So, you know, no dots we can connect there, that correlate to decisions that the Russians have made, or he has made, on the battlefield,” he said, referring to the “repositioning” of Russian forces around Kyiv, and the “re-prioritization” of the Donbas region.
“Now, whether that itself is an outcome of Mr. Putin all of a sudden getting informed, we don’t know,” he went on. “So I can’t point to a specific decision point or a specific action that the Russians are taking and tell you that that’s evidence that, you know, Mr. Putin is now more informed than he was before.” In other words, the U.S. doesn’t really know what’s happening, or why.
