Vladimir Putin, intelligence officials say, is isolated in a bubble of his own making, which very little outside information penetrates, particularly any which might challenge what he thinks.
That’s according MI6 John Sawers, the BBC reports.
The risk is what is called “group think” in which everyone reinforces his view. “If he’s a victim of group think we need to know who the group is,” says Professor Adrian Furnham.
The circle of those Putin talks to has never been large but when it came to the decision to invade Ukraine, it had narrowed to just a handful of people, Western intelligence officials believe, all of those “true believers” who share Putin’s mindset and obsessions.
A concern now is that reliable information is still not finding its way into Putin’s closed loop. His intelligence services may have been reluctant before the invasion to tell him anything he did not want to hear, offering rosy estimates of how an invasion would go and how Russian troops would be received before the war. And this week one Western official said Putin may still not have the insight into how badly things are going for his own troops that Western intelligence has. That leads to concern about how he might react when confronted with a worsening situation for Russia.
