Judging from the words of Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, the Kremlin has relinquished centralized control over Russia’s information space and Vladimir Putin is unable to resolve this, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has stated in its latest report.

“There is infighting in the Kremlin inner circle, that the Kremlin has ceded centralized control over the Russian information space, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently cannot readily fix it,” the ISW wrote quoting Zakharova’s speech during a forum on information warfare in Moscow on Saturday.

#Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova confirmed that there is infighting in the #Kremlin inner circle, that the Kremlin has ceded centralized control over the Russian information space, and that #Putin apparently cannot readily fix it. https://t.co/faLSmaGT1S https://t.co/I0thozklaH

— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) March 12, 2023

The institute stressed that Zakharova’s statement confirms that “the Kremlin cannot replicate the Stalinist approach of establishing a modern equivalent to the Soviet Information Bureau to centrally control Russia’s internal information space due to fighting among unspecified Kremlin ‘elites’.”

The ISW stressed that it is unclear why Zakharova, an experienced spokesperson, openly raised these issues in a public forum.

4/ It is unclear why #Zakharova — a seasoned senior spokesperson — would have openly acknowledged these problems in a public setting. https://t.co/faLSmaGT1S

— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) March 12, 2023

“Zakharova may have directly discussed these problems for the first time to temper Russian nationalist milbloggers’ expectations regarding the current capabilities of the Kremlin to cohere around a unified narrative — or possibly even a unified policy,” the think-tank assessed.