Does Putin Really Believe That?

Putin is trying to demonstrate loyalty and thus relevance by showing that he is happy to leap on whichever bandwagon the Kremlin sends their way first. But in his own, cack-hand in tone-deaf way, he is doing what everybody else within the system, except for those handful of people who really are shaping the narrative, is doing. The intelligent cycle is a way of understanding how intelligence agencies work and how materials get transmitted to the political leadership. It goes through the cycle, and there's the tasking, there's the gathering of the intelligence,. There's the analysis, and then there's the briefing process where it gets fed into the political system.