Trying to decipher major Western reporting on Vladimir Putin

Marie Jégo reports in a new article for Le Monde English on Vladimir Putin’s wartime leadership. (1) It provides a good example of why critical reading is called for with such pieces.

Like other dictators before him, Vladimir Putin has his own television news programs. Every evening, after the 8 pm broadcast, teams from the official channel Rossiya 1 stay at their workplace and re-edit the news segments to deliver a carefully filtered version, stripped of any news likely to displease the Russian president.

This system was described by Dmitri Skorobutov, former editor-in-chief of the channel's nightly news broadcast who has been living in exile in Europe since 2020, in an interview in June to The Moscow Times, an opposition media outlet in exile. Introduced in 2011, at the time of the major Russian protests against electoral fraud, the practice intensified after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to the point that Putin is now said to be "completely cut off from the reality on the front lines," according to Skorobutov.

The fact that Le Monde is calling the Moscow Times “an opposition media outlet in exile” lends the latter credibility, though of course critical reading is always in order. AP News reported in 2024: “The Russian prosecutor general’s office on Wednesday declared The Moscow Times, an online newspaper popular among Russia’s expatriate community, as an ‘undesirable organization’.” (2)

But when we ask what those two paragraphs from Le Monde tell us, I would say it’s entirely likely that Putin has his own news summaries prepared. As presumably many other heads of government also do. (Trump’s practice of watching FOX News in the wee ours is not likely to the standard practice in most countries!) Are the news summaries for Putin “stripped of any news likely to displease the Russian president”? That’s entirely possible. And Dmitri Skorobutov as former editor-in-chief at Rossiya 1 presumably has better sources for such reporting than most of us do.

But it’s also worth noting that not all actual and aspiring dictators insist on hearing only opinions and factual reports that fit their preferences. The British historian in his 1991 book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives argued that Joseph Stalin, not renowned for his patience with internal political opposition, actually made a practice of seeking out alternative opinions from his advisers on major decisions. He contrasted that with Hitler’s practice of much preferring advice that fitted his own self-presumed genius assessments of situations.

Is Putin "completely cut off from the reality on the front lines"? Who knows? He’s been the de facto head of the Russian government for over a quarter of a century, so it’s possible that he has an isolated bubble of his own, as Skorobutov describes. I’m not so convinced that the situation is as extreme as Jégo depicts it:

His own lies may have ended up convincing him. Stuck in the past, he is wary of the internet and new communication technologies. The president has never sent an email in his life and does not own a cell phone. His sources of information are limited to television news programs tailored to his point of view and reports from generals and advisers who are careful not to contradict him. "Those close to him tell him what he wants to hear," summarized Grantseva. "He has in fact indoctrinated those around him, who in turn indoctrinate him. It's a vicious circle that no one can escape." (3)

Putin is a former KGB officer, of course he’s wary of spying on his communications. Most government officials involved with national security issues tend to be. Although the US Secretary of “War” Peter Hegseth and his collaborators on Signal may not be. Trump himself has obviously not been as careful of operational security as one might expect of a President, e.g., classified documents stored in unsecured boxes in Mar-a-Lago bathrooms.

Putin’s government decided in May to release this obviously carefully-produced four-minute propaganda video – which in this version runs twice - to counter rumors that he was hiding in a bunker. So his government is sensitive to such claims: (3)

Le Monde also reports, “Russian forces lost ground in May, for the second month in a row, according to analysis by the Institute for the Study of War [ISW], an American think tank.”

May is a key word there. Jégo’s article was published on July 5. As I noted in a post just a few days ago, the ISW’s daily updates in June indicated that the Russian were advancing on the front lines, but very slowly. There have been massive laying of landmines on both sides of the lines of engagement, and drone attacks (especially from Ukraine’s side) are making advances to seize more territory very difficult. And I referenced the academic journal Osteuropa’s war blog and John Mearsheimer’s very recent assessments that both indicated the same thing.

This is primarily a war of attrition, despite all the publicity the drone war is generating. Ukraine at the moment has been successful in neutralizing much of the Russian fleet’s operations in the Black Sea, which depend on Russia’s use of ports in the illegally-annexed Crimea. And they may be able to isolate Russia from direct access to the Crimean peninsula. Ukrainian attacks on Crimea have been important in a strategic sense because it has impeded Russia’s access to Ukrainian oil. How much it would benefit Ukraine in the current war to completely retake control of Crimea while the provinces (oblasts) of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson remain mostly under Russian occupation is another question.

Jégo writes, “Isolated in this curated information bubble, the Russian president continually claims that his army is advancing ‘every day in all directions’ in Ukraine.” Making inflated claims is not the same as actually being self-deceived or isolated from uncomfortable information. Putin was a well-trained KGB agent, after all, so he has ideas about the kind of public propaganda he wants to express. And, we should give him credit: even his most dubious propaganda claims are normally much better crafted than the babble that Donald Trump spits out on a daily basis.

Jégo stresses similarities between Putin’s regime and the pre-1989 Soviet system. That there are some to be found isn’t terribly surprising since, you know, Russia is the largest and most powerful of the successor states of the former Soviet Union. Today’s capitalist, plutocratic, Mafia-like state is not politically organized like the Communist government of the USSR was. And his system looks pretty good to the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks and Donald Trumps of the world.

Warning, you may experience reflexive eye-rolling at the next thing:

Could Ukraine become Putin's Afghanistan? The comparison needs to be nuanced. "In Ukraine, the consequences of the war go beyond those of Afghanistan, especially in human terms," recalled Kastouéva-Jean. "Russia is now losing more men there in a single month than the Soviet Union did in a decade of conflict in Afghanistan [1979-1989, between 15,000 and 26,000 according to Russian sources]."

It’s remarkable how many Western neocons and assorted commentators take it for granted that the Soviet war in Afghanistan was the primary cause of the fall of the Soviet Union.

While no one seems to doubt that the war was unpopular among the public, the actual evidence for such an effect is fairly slim. Particularly compared to the very consequential effects of the USSR having become a petrostate and all that entailed, and of the challenges of modernizing Soviet industry in the 1980s. But this idea became a key part of neocon dogma to justify inciting insurrections in countries they see as having unfriendly, uncooperative governments, like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq or the long-stand clerical regime in Iran. Now it’s a zombie trope that is obviously still stalking around the minds of interventionist-minded commentators. And we still hear it being used to argue that the current Russia-Ukraine War will have the same effect in Moscow. We see that reflected in Jégo’s report, as well.

Here it’s worth noting an anonymous article from the current Moscow Times on Russian experience with hardship in recent decades:

Two things we mustn’t forget tell us a lot. First, a number of major cities have faced high-profile attacks or tragedies in recent decades: the Crocus City Hall attack, the Volgograd train station suicide bombing, the St. Petersburg metro bombing, the Kemerovo shopping mall fire, not to mention the 1999 apartment bombings shortly before then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became president. Since 2022, many smaller cities and regions have been hit by drones, notably in the largely forgotten Operation Spider’s Web attacks.

Second, most ordinary Russians are accustomed to chugging along through economic difficulties in modern history. A shrug at the economy and an instinct to hunker down without fuss in tough times were expected. ...

I remember waking up on the morning opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was killed and feeling how tense it was. My spouse told me to be careful with what I posted online. I remember Putin disappearing from public view for a while and all the rumors people had heard. I remember getting emails from my employer in 2019-21 urging us to avoid certain weekend protests. My salary was briefly cut during Covid. As for February 2022, I just couldn’t believe it.

But each time, the country carried on. Friends told me repeatedly that this was a small crisis. Not because they were brainwashed by state propaganda about the 1990s, but because they had actually lived through harder times and come out the other side with a decent quality of life. Colleagues took great delight in explaining something about the Russian character: we’re good in tough times. (4)

This is related to the mistaken idea that bombing civilian areas will break the war morale of population being bombed and therefore push them to demand their government give up their war against, uh, the side that’s bombing them. We see a similar phenomenon with economic sanctions, which can be strategically useful in depriving a hostile country of very specific militarily-relevant goods. But sanctions that cause hunger or deprivation of critical medications don’t successfully convey a message to the affected civilians of, “We’re not against you, only against your government.”

Jégo’s article concludes with a factual observation about other “hybrid operations” by Russia against the West. I prefer the term “hybrid operations” to the often-used term “hybrid warfare.” Because it’s important to distinguish between annoyance and provocations on the one hand, and actual warfare on the other. It’s also common for xenophobic politicians to complain that asylum seekers and other irregular migration are tantamount to a military invasion. Immigrants may be inconvenient. But unless they are coming as part of an actual military operation, they are not an invasion. And immigration is not warfare, “hybrid” or otherwise.

Jégo puts it this way:

Western intelligence agencies are warning of an intensification of hybrid operations. "They relentlessly target critical infrastructure, democratic processes, supply chains and public trust," warned Anne Keast-Butler, director of the British government's intelligence, cybersecurity, and security agency, in May. Aerial incursions, GPS signal jamming, sabotage of infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, repeated provocations at European borders: With no victory in Ukraine in sight, Moscow is relying more than ever on its capacity to cause disruption. [my emphasis]

Notes:

(1) Jégo, Marie (2026): Vladimir Putin, or the loneliness of 'Homo Sovieticus'. Le Monde English 07/06/2026. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/07/05/vladimir-putin-or-the-loneliness-of-homo-sovieticus_6755172_4.html> (Accessed: 2026-06-07).

(2) Russia declares newspaper The Moscow Times ‘undesirable’ amid crackdown on criticism. AP News 07/11/2024. <https://apnews.com/article/russia-media-newspaper-crackdown-moscow-times-9f6713ac4a880a57946ee9b7214b78f1> (Accessed: 2026-06-07).

(3) Putin Appears In Moscow As Russia Rejects Reports Of Underground War Bunker Isolation. The Financial Express [India] YouTube channel 05/13/2026. <https://youtu.be/FZHIoU0F0cw?si=syh1WSQfuDUNUiev> (Accessed: 2026-06-07). The description on YouTube notes, “The video shows Putin casually driving a Russian-made SUV through central Moscow before meeting his former school teacher, Vera Gurevich, in what many see as a direct response to growing speculation about his security situation and isolation during the Ukraine war.”

(4) The World Shouldn’t Be Confused When Russians Shrug Off a Crisis. The Moscow Times 06/29/2026. <https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/06/29/the-world-shouldnt-be-confused-when-russians-shrug-off-a-crisis-a93120> (Accessed: 2026-06-07).