Bret Stephens: 'The long and short of it: Putin has no independent sources of reliable information.'
President Vladimir Putin of Russia during a joint news conference in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, July 19, 2022.If Vladimir Putin had ever bothered to read Evan Gershkovich’s reporting — it’s a safe bet he didn’t, for reasons I’ll explain below — he might have thought a little harder before throwing him into prison last week on transparently bogus espionage charges.
And, like despots through the ages, he listens only to people who tell him what he wants to hear. One of them, the oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, The Journal reported, “assured Mr. Putin that Ukrainians saw themselves as Russian, and would welcome the invading soldiers with flowers.” Putin is godfather to one of Medvedchuk’s daughters.
On the one hand, their presence in the country creates an illusion of openness, of having nothing to hide. It’s a form of propaganda. Had the Russian president read Gershkovich’s reporting over the past year, he might have read a story or two that would have pleased him, like one from last summer about young Russians largely ignoring the war.
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