The CIA assured Trump that Putin could be broken.
American intelligence agencies have had varying views on Russian President Vladimir Putin's ability to accept the options proposed by the West and Kyiv for ending the Ukrainian conflict , according to The Wall Street Journal, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
Citing its sources, the publication reports that after Donald Trump's election as president, the White House asked American intelligence agencies to assess Moscow's potential for negotiations.
Thus, the CIA decided that it made sense for Trump to negotiate with Putin.
"CIA assessments were sometimes optimistic about the prospects for finding common ground with Russian leadership," the WSJ writes.
In turn, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) believed that Putin would not back down from his demands and recalled them , which include the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.
INR emphasizes that Putin " will not be prepared to give up his maximalist demands ."
These conclusions were prepared before the Alaska summit. Afterward, the publication claims, the State Department's intelligence leadership declared that such assessments were damaging to the credibility of the INR. As a result, several analysts who prepared the conclusions were fired, and one resigned.
The CIA assured Trump that Putin could be broken.