Alfredo Mantici: “US 007 dossier is a message to Ukraine. Intelligence presses for mediation.”

A bath in reality and a change of strategy, coming through 007’s “tips” to the media. Messages directed on the one hand to the White House, on the other to Western public opinion. This is how Alfredo Mantici, former Sisde chief of analysts and now professor of intelligence at Unint in Rome, interprets the latest releases in the U.S. press regarding the war scenarios in Ukraine, from the mistrust of the U.S. intelligence services in the effectiveness of Kiev’s counteroffensive to the exorbitant number (half a million) of Russian and Ukrainian dead and wounded, passing through the proposal made by the NATO chief of staff to grant Ukraine entry into the Alliance in exchange for a cease-fire and the start of negotiations with Moscow. “The problem,” Mantici says, “is that we live in a condition of war information.

What does this mean?

“That information on the one hand is functional to support the cause of the good guys against the bad guys, and on the other hand is functional to support the politics of those who support the good guys against the bad guys.

Every day, however, the intelligence and military structures, and then also the media, are also confronted with reality. For more than a year and a half we have been hearing that the Russian army was boiled and that Putin was a fool and was finished, as if Ukraine had now brought home the victory. I have already won a dinner with a distinguished historian who on the day of Wagner and Prigozhin’s march on Moscow phoned me to say that Putin was at the end of the line.”

What about instead?

“Instead, the time has come to confront reality, the reality that the intelligence community is familiar with, and to test public reactions to a truth that is not the one told by propaganda. The chief of staff of the NATO secretary general days ago said what he said, about the start of negotiations. The reaction with official denial was immediate, the poor guy was cornered and forced into an embarrassing backtrack, for a technician of that level.”

What is the reality?

“The Ukrainians will never win the war, they will never regain all the lost territories, and this feeling is beginning to take hold not only at the technical level, but also at the political level. So you phone your journalist friend who is willing to divulge so-called plausible deniability (the ability to deny something that has been said or done by a third party for which you are responsible, ed.). Through anonymous sources, the idea that this war will not end with the fall of Putin or the triumphant march of the Ukrainian army into Red Square is beginning to be digested by the Western public.”

And how will it end?

“With a Korean scenario, a frozen war along a cease-fire strip, maybe for 70-80 years. In my opinion, Putin did not want to invade all of Ukraine, he would not have deployed 160,000 men if for Berlin alone Stalin deployed 200,000 and for Czechoslovakia in ’68 it was 800,000. Putin wanted the Donbass and Mariupol, the land link to Crimea. It is time to be realistic. Ukraine does not have enough men to regain what it has lost. Resisting to the last man makes no sense, just as dogging Bakhmut did not, as U.S. intelligence has pointed out. To attack, the ratio must be not even but, as everyone knows, at least 3 to 1. The reality of a war is like pregnancy, beyond a certain limit you cannot hide it.”

Apart from public opinion, to whom are these intelligence indiscretions directed?

“To President Biden. This is a way for the intelligence community to ‘explain’ to the White House how things really are. Then to the Ukrainians themselves. The first one to talk about peace in Zelensky’s entourage is finished, unless advisor Podoljak or Minister Kuleba does it. And the two of them will only talk about peace when the Americans say to do so. Just as in Ferragosto three years ago they told the Afghans: thank you and goodbye.”

English translation of Marco Ventura’s article, published in Il Messaggero. 18 August 2023