Vladimir Putin overruled his generals and personally ordered his encircled troops in Ukraine to stay and fight to the death in Ukraine, it has been claimed.
The Russian tyrant is deluded about the true nature of the war and is so concerned by the order of command that he now regularly intervenes to direct strategy despite having never served in the military, officials say.
When his ill-equipped soldiers were surrounded by Ukraine in the country’s eastern city of Lyman in September, generals ordered a hasty retreat to save lives and artillery.
But the commanding officer on the front line then received an encrypted call from the Kremlin ordering them to stand firm, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
Vladimir Putin (pictured today alongside Alexander Lukashenko) overruled his generals and personally ordered his encircled troops in Ukraine to stay and fight to the death in Ukraine, it has been claimed
Days later, with dozens more killed, the Russian troops were left with no option but to perform a humiliating retreat.
The city in the Donbas, which was previously in Russia’s hands, was now littered with the bodies of its own soldiers and artillery supplies which the grateful Ukrainians gladly scooped up as they recaptured the territory.
Some Kremlin insiders say the episode is indicative of a chaotic strategy under Putin’s leadership which has resulted in the drawn-out 10-month invasion, originally envisaged to last just days, and tens of thousands of troops killed.
The war-mongering despot receives a written daily briefing on the war at 7am but officials say the information is carefully selected to give a flattering account and obscure the horrors of what is happening on the ground.
Ekaterina Vinokurova, a former member of his hand-picked human rights council, said: ‘The people around Putin protect themselves.
Ukrainian soldiers with the 43rd Heavy Artillery Brigade fire a rocket from a 2S7 Pion self propelled cannon in Bakhmut on December 26
Russia was forced into an embarrassing retreat from Lyman (pictured) after Putin ordered his troops to stay and fight
‘They have this deep belief that they shouldn’t upset the president.’
Putin has shunned the internet for fear of Western surveillance and he is fully dependent on reports from his personally appointed advisers who are afraid to speak the truth.
Some of the updates from the battlefield can even take days to arrive on his desk, meaning the information is no longer relevant.
His willing lapdogs frequently highlight Moscow’s successes and downplay its many failures in the war, giving Putin confidence that he will still push on to victory.
US intelligence claims there is not one senior Kremlin figure with Putin’s ear who is prepared to upset him or counter his warped worldview.
The president has even held meetings with military experts and arms manufacturers who were left baffled by his deluded state of mind.
Ukrainian soldiers with the 43rd Heavy Artillery Brigade wait to fire 2S7 Pion self propelled cannon on the battlefield
In July, 30 chiefs from major defence companies were summoned to his residence on the outskirts of Moscow where he claimed the war was a success, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
He bafflingly told the executives that Ukrainians were only fighting through fear that their army was shooting any deserters.
The arms makers left the meeting with the feeling Putin ‘lacked a clear picture of the conflict’, the Wall Street Journal reported.
One of the reasons Putin is so blinkered about the war is his source of information.
He has recruited four of the biggest pro-war influencers to go to the front lines and embed with the army to send him ‘raw information’.
The team of state propagandists form a Kremlin-run working group to produce a monthly report on the progress of the invasion.
The authoritarian has even received manufactured polling data from the FSB that said Ukrainians would welcome Russians with open arms.
Some argue that Putin’s intelligence at the start of the war was bogus and he would not have sent troops over the border if he knew the true strength of the Ukrainian army.
Senior lawmaker Konstantin Zatulin from the ruling pro-war United Russia said Putin ‘proceeded from an incomplete understanding of the situation and in some ways not fully correct.’
He added the war planners ‘clearly underestimated the strength of the enemy and overestimated their own’.
CIA director William Burns said earlier this year: ‘I had dealt with and watched President Putin for many years and what I’ve seen, especially over the last decade, is him in a way stewing in a very combustible combination of grievance and ambition and insecurity [that] are all kind of wrapped together.’
The intelligence chief said Putin’s narrowing inner circle and his grip on power have both tightened, making him more isolated and paranoid.
Burns said Putin believed his military was sufficiently modernised and the economy strong enough to secure a quick victory and withstand sanctions.
After suffering a series of defeats in its ‘special military operation,’ Russia is now seeking a battlefield victory by capturing Bakhmut, an industrial city with a pre-war population of 70,000, now reduced to about 10,000 mostly elderly residents.
Gaining control of the city could give Russia a stepping stone to advance on two bigger cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Over the past 24 hours, Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian attacks in the areas of two settlements in Luhansk province and six in Donetsk, the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said on Tuesday.
It also reported more Russian shelling of Kherson city, in the Zaporizhzhia region and of settlements in the Kharkiv region of northeast Ukraine near the border with Russia.
