Fiona Hill

maybe a kind of more eclectic, diversified set of information.

He would meet with people.

You know, you've heard all the stories about where he had once called up Masha Gessen, you know, and had to come in, you know, obviously a very different character as a journalist and a critic.

We've heard about Venedicta from Echo Moscovy, the radio program, the editor, who Putin would talk to and consult with.

He'd reach out.

People like Lyudmila Alekseyeva, for example, the head of Memorial, he had some respect for her and would sometimes just talk to her, for example.

All of that seems to have come to a halt.

And I think a lot of us worry, I mean, us who watch Putin, about what kind of information is he getting?

Is it just information that he's seeking and gathering himself that fits into his worldview and his framework?

We're all guilty of that, of looking for things.

It gets to our social media preferences.

People just bring into him things that they think he wants to hear, like the algorithm, you know, kind of like the Kremlin working in that regard.

Or is he himself in a tapping into source of information that he absolutely wants?

And remember, he is not a military guy.

He's an operative and he was sort of trained in operations and, you know, contingency planning.

Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, as a civil engineer, was the former minister of emergencies.

He wasn't a military planner.

Somebody like Gerasimov, the chiefs of staff, maybe a military guy in this case from the army, but he's also somebody who's in a different part of the chain of command.

He's not somebody who would spontaneously start telling Putin things.

Putin comes out of the FSB, out of the KGB of the Soviet era, and he knows the way that intelligence gets filtered and works.