Vladimir Putin is being kept in the dark about his country’s failures on the battlefield, analysts claim.
The Russian president is ‘divorced from reality’ because of a culture of lying among commanders to exaggerate their military advances, experts have said.
In its latest report on the war in Ukraine, the Institute for the Study of War says Putin is being given a fictitious picture of the conflict, fueling his hardened approach to negotiating a ceasefire.
This weekend, the Kremlin maintained its demands for peace after US envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with the Russian leader in an attempt to restart talks to end the war.
Moscow has not ruled out the possibility of trilateral talks with both the US and Ukraine, as well as a phone call between Putin and Trump.
But Putin wants to fully annexe the Donetsk Oblast in the Donbas region and has set a deadline of the end of the year for this to happen.
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Despite Russia occupying more than four fifths of Donbas, experts believe that Russia will not seize the remaining area until 2032 at the current rate of advance, which was 2.91 square kilometres a day in August.
However, analysts believe Putin’s hardline stance is being backed up by ‘beautiful reports’ from the frontline, giving the impression that the Russian army is taking land at a much faster rate than it actually is.
The ISW report says: ‘Russian high-ranking military commanders also routinely present exaggerated Russian advances as part of Russia’s systematic cognitive warfare effort to portray Russian forces as making sweeping advances and Ukrainian defenses as collapsing.
‘The lies and distortions of Russian military commanders at many levels are likely leading Putin to harden his perception that Russian forces can achieve his intended objectives in Donetsk Oblast by the end of 2026 and thus that he need not make any compromises in his aims.’
It continues: ‘Putin’s battlefield fiction remains divorced from the reality of Ukraine’s defensive abilities, Russia’s own degraded offensive capabilities, and the difficult and expansive terrain Russian forces must still fight through to achieve Putin’s strategic goal in the region.
‘Putin’s many deadlines to seize all of Donbas reflect in part his need to provide a significant informational victory to the Russian people.’
Three hours of talks on Saturday appeared to have not resulted in a breakthrough, with the White House saying next steps would be announced in the coming weeks.
A Russian oil refinery in Ryazan, a region bordering Moscow, was among targets struck by Ukrainian forces today, Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed.
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