In the days following the invasion, Ruslandhuis arrives at a devastating conclusion. The senior Russian security officials whose communications they had been monitoring for months turn out to have been just as blindsided by the war as they were. Only a tiny circle of confidants — perhaps ten people at most — knew about Putin’s war plans. It explains the mismatch with the Americans. The US intelligence agencies evidently had access to someone or something inside that innermost circle. [...]
Now they realise that some members of Russia’s Security Council had no idea at that moment that war was coming. There were even soldiers who marched into Ukraine believing they were on a training exercise in Belarus. ‘This war was prepared in a completely different way than you would expect based on Russian protocol,’ one official says.