Putin 'angry and lashing out at inner circle', US intelligence claims

Vladimir Putin is angry and lashing out at his inner circle over Russian military failures in Ukraine and the scale of the international reaction, the US claimed on Tuesday.

American officials told NBC television they have “solid intelligence” of uncharacteristic outbursts of fury from the Russian leader and fear he may resort to even greater violence.

“The main concern is the information he's getting and how isolated he is. The isolation is a really big concern,” an unnamed Western diplomat told NBC. “We don't believe he has a realistic understanding of what's going on.”

“This is somebody that’s clearly been caught off guard by the size of the Ukrainian resistance,” said Senator Mark Warner, who receives classified briefings as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“I do worry that he’s been backed into a corner. I do worry that there is no obvious exit ramp.”

The claims are impossible to verify independently but American intelligence has proved remarkably accurate so far. 

Officials told NBC that Western intelligence agencies currently have “good visibility” of Mr Putin and he is not showing signs of mental instability, although his behaviour has changed markedly from the past.

That suggests the West has a source within the Russian leader’s inner circle or some other means of monitoring it.

“He was always hard, cold, disciplined, almost machine-like,” Gen James Clapper, a former US national intelligence director, told Business Insider.

“Now his anger, fury show. His meandering, incoherent rants are illogical and scary. He has no one who can push back and disagree with him.”

There were further signs of Russian anger on Tuesday as Dmitri Medvedev, a close Putin loyalist, threatened war against France.

Mr Medvedev was responding to comments by the French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, who said: “We are going to deliver a total economic and financial war against Russia”.

“Today, some French minister has said that they declared an economic war on Russia. Watch your tongue, gentlemen! And don’t forget that in human history, economic wars quite often turned into real ones,” Mr Medvedev responded on Twitter.

The comment was particularly striking because Mr Medvedev has never been seen as a hawk.

He served as a stand-in president for Mr Putin from 2008 to 2012 and his term was marked by a rapprochement with the United States that saw him sharing hamburgers with Barack Obama and getting a private tour of Apple's headquarters from Steve Jobs.

In recent years, however, he has begun to voice increasingly hawkish views in line with Mr Putin’s.

The Russian leader’s reported outbursts stand in sharp contrast to the dark, depressed mood expressed by other key figures of his government.

Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, economic adviser Maxim Oreshkin and central bank chief Elvira Nabiullina, once lauded in the West for their prudent fiscal and financial policies, appeared shell-shocked when they appeared in public for the first time since the invasion on Monday to discuss measures to salvage Russia’s economy. 

Ms Nabiullina, who is known for wearing different brooches to hint at possible interest rate hikes, wore funereal black.

On the sixth day of the invasion, Russian state television persisted in describing the war as a “special military operation” in eastern Ukraine.

It reported Ukrainian separatist advances against government troops in the east in detail but made no mention of devastating air strikes on Kharkiv and Kyiv.

In a bid to justify invading a country where millions of Russians have friends and family, the government has ordered schools to hold special lessons to convince teenagers the war is just.

Several Russian media outlets published lesson plans distributed by the education ministry. In Moscow, a PowerPoint presentation described Russia’s war against Ukraine as a “peace-maker operation” and suggested Nato and Ukraine had been plotting to destroy Russia, according to the Media Zona website.

Schools were also ordered to show teenagers the address in which Mr Putin effectively declared war on Ukraine and debate such questions as “Can one describe Russia’s actions as an older sibling helping a younger one?”