Jeremy Fleming, head of Britain’s GCHQ intelligence service, said Putin had “overestimated his army’s ability to secure a quick victory” and that his advisers were “afraid to tell him the truth” about a campaign that ” suffered from problems “. . “We now see Putin trying to follow his plan. But it fails. “And his plan B was more barbaric against civilians and cities,” Fleming said in a speech at the Australian National University. “We have seen Putin lying to his own people in an attempt to hide his military incompetence,” he added. “Putin seems to be increasingly appreciating the situation,” said the British intelligence chief, adding that Russian soldiers who rejected orders and destroyed their own equipment had no weapons or morale. “It is clear that he misjudged the resistance of the Ukrainian people. He underestimated the strength of the coalition that his actions would strengthen. He supported the financial consequences of the sanctions regime. “ He added that mercenaries, including the Russian-backed Wagner Group, were sending more foreign troops to the area. “These soldiers are likely to be used as cannon fodder to try to limit Russian military casualties,” he said. Fleming directly accused Putin of playing by different moral and legal rules. “It has become his personal war, with the cost being paid by innocent people in Ukraine and increasingly by ordinary Russians as well,” he said. Regarding China, the GCHQ chief warned that Beijing’s global interests were “not being served well” by aligning with Moscow. “We know both presidents Xi [Jinping] and Putin attach great value to their personal relationships. . . “But there are risks for both, and more so for China, to be very closely aligned.” Beijing “wants to set. . . “the models for a new world government,” he said, noting, however, that Russia was a regime “deliberately and illegally ignoring them all.”

Britain’s condemnation came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russia was mobilizing troops to launch new strikes on eastern Ukraine after Moscow said it had “completely liberated” the Donbas region. Zelensky made the remarks in a video interview late Wednesday after the Russian Defense Ministry said it was withdrawing from major cities in northern and western Ukraine, including the capital Kiev and Chernihiv, in order to focus on the east of the country. Zelensky said: “We do not believe in anyone – we do not trust any beautiful verbal construction.” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Wednesday that Moscow was carrying out a “planned rotation” between Kyiv and Chernihiv after “completing all major tasks” in that part of the country. He added that the army was entering the “final phase” of its operations in eastern Ukraine in order to “complete the operation for the full liberation of Donbass”, the predominantly Russian-speaking border region in eastern Ukraine. Video: China, Russia and the war in Ukraine