Vladimir Putin “massively misjudged the situation” in Ukraine according to a British spy chief who said that Russian soldiers were refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own equipment and had accidentally shot down their own aircraft.
Jeremy Fleming, head of Britain’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ, said Putin had “overestimated the abilities of his military to secure a rapid victory” and that his advisers were “afraid to tell him the truth” about a campaign that had been “beset by problems”.
“We’ve seen Putin lie to his own people in an attempt to hide military incompetence,” Fleming said in a speech to the Australian National University.