Russian leader has overruled his generals and personally ordered his trapped troops in Ukraine to remain in Ukraine and fight to the death, it has been claimed.
The Russian tyrant is delusional about the true nature of the war and is so concerned about the order of command that he now regularly steps in to direct strategy, though he has never served in the military, officials say.
When his ill-equipped soldiers were surrounded by Ukraine in the eastern city of Lyman in September, generals ordered a hasty retreat to save lives and artillery.
But the commanding officer at the front then received an encrypted phone call from the Kremlin ordering them to stand firm, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
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 Russian soldiers guarding it, allowing Ukrainians gladly scooped up the artillery supplies as they recaptured the territory.
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.
‘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, Daily Mail reported.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
