A Kremlin spokesman on Thursday dismissed a US intel assessment which concluded that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is being misled by his top advisers, AFP reports. “This shows that neither the Department of State nor the Pentagon have real information about what is happening in the Kremlin,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “They don’t understand President Putin, they don’t understand the mechanism for taking decisions and they don’t understand the style of our work,” inside of their magical little castle with its funny onion-shaped domes.
American and British officials have been putting the word out that Putin’s goons were just telling him what he wanted to hear, with Britain’s GCHQ spy agency chief, Jeremy Fleming on Thursday saying “Putin’s advisers are afraid to tell him the truth”. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters on Wednesday “With regard to President Putin, look, what I can tell you is this, and I said this before, one of the Achilles’ heels of autocracies is that you don’t have people in those systems who speak truth to power or who have the ability to speak truth to power. And I think that is something that we’re seeing in Russia.”