CANBERRA, Australia
Demoralized Russian soldiers
in Ukraine were refusing to carry out orders and sabotaging their own equipment
and had accidentally shot down their own aircraft, a U.K. intelligence chief
said on Thursday. Jeremy Fleming, head of the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
Jeremy Fleming, who heads the
GCHQ electronic spy agency, made the remarks at a speech in the Australian
capital Canberra.
Russian President Vladimir
Putin had apparently “massively misjudged” the invasion, he said.
“It’s clear he misjudged the
resistance of the Ukrainian people. He underestimated the strength of the
coalition his actions would galvanize. He underplayed the economic consequences
of the sanctions regime, and he overestimated the abilities of his military to
secure a rapid victory,” Fleming said.
“We’ve seen Russian soldiers,
short of weapons and morale, refusing to carry out orders, sabotaging their own
equipment and even accidentally shooting down their own aircraft,” Fleming
added.
Although Putin’s advisers were
believed to be too afraid to tell the truth, the “extent of these misjudgments
must be crystal clear to the regime,” he said.
Fleming warned that the
Kremlin was hunting for cyber targets and bringing in mercenaries to shore up
its stalled military campaign in Ukraine.
He praised Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s “information operation” for being highly effective at
countering Russia’s massive disinformation drive spreading propaganda about the
war.
While there were expectations that Russia would launch a major cyberattack as part of its military campaign, Fleming said such a move was never a central part of Moscow’s standard playbook for war.
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