When Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24 on orders from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president obviously hoped to capture Ukraine quickly. But for all the destruction that Russian forces have inflicted in Ukraine, the Ukrainian army has fought back much more aggressively than Putin anticipated — and according to a U.S. official interviewed by Fox News, Putin doesn’t realize how “badly” the war is going for Russia.
In an article published by Fox News on March 30, reporters Ronn Blitzer and Patrick Ward write that according to the official — who they quote anonymously — Russian military leaders aren’t telling Putin the entire truth about the conflict in Ukraine.
The official told Fox News, “Putin didn’t even know his military was using and losing conscripts in Ukraine, showing a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president.”
According to that U.S. official, Putin’s advisers in Moscow are “too afraid to tell him the truth” about how the war in Ukraine is going for Russian forces.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created the worst military crisis in Europe since World War 2 — even worse than the violence that plagued the former Yugoslavia after the demise of the communist Eastern Bloc in the early 1990s. More than 4 million refugees, according to the United Nations, have fled Ukraine since February 24. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has estimated that somewhere between 7500 and 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed during the conflict.
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