Anders Aslund also argues that the anonymous sources and Russian political experts regularly quoted by western media can’t be trusted. “I do not understand how one can quote propagandists such as Gleb Pavlovsky, Minchenko or even Dmitri Peskov as “analysts,” not to mention official Russian media. They are propagandists. Essentially nobody knows what is happening in the Kremlin, and most that comes out is disinformation”, said M.Aslund by mail (Gleb Pavlovsky was quoted by Shaun Walker in an article for the Guardian). Earlier, he also criticized the use of Russian experts by the Moscow Times. “Better stick to Putin”, he argued.

Maybe not surprisingly, those Russian experts M.Aslund sees as “visibly distorted” have a different view on Ivanov’s departure. Stanislav Belkovsky, for example, sees the dismissal of Putin’s chief of staff not as a political fight between the two, but rather as the replacement of Putin’s old friends with younger, just as loyal but less close, bureaucrats. Several Russian news outlet also quoted an anonymous source arguing that Ivanov, traumatized by the death of his son in November 2014, had already asked to leave several times. If this was true, this would also go against M.Aslund’s theory.

The wilderness of mirrors

Is it true, though? After all, the Kremlin is well-known for using the media to achieve political objectives, sometimes in an over-the-top way that leaves no room for doubts, sometimes in a much more subtle fashion.

The most obvious –but not the least efficient- is kompromat, the contraction of “compromising materials” in Russian. The release of footage showing a political opponent in an unflattering situation (often, a sexual one) in order to discredit him has been a staple of Russian politics for the last two decades, and it doesn’t seem like it will go away anytime soon. In May, a TV channel close to the Kremlin broadcasted a report showing an opposition leader in bed with a female assistant who was not his wife. The scandal that ensued was enough to sow discord among an already divided opposition movement, with other opposition leaders calling for his resignation.

And then there is the less brutal method of “strategic leaks”, the well-placed but anonymous source who whisper interesting information in the ear of a journalist. In a closed political system such as Russia’s, those little bits of insider information are very much appreciated by russian as well as foreign journalists, which makes it an ideal way of spreading disinformation. Indeed, in the case of Ivanov’s dismissal, the story about the death of his son could very easily be a way to push the official Kremlin narrative of Ivanov having asked himself to leave.

Those leaks also allows everyone in Russia’s political life to get an idea about which direction the wind is blowing, in a political system where signals often matter more than official declarations. The disgrace of an official can for example be “prepared” by leaking his wrongdoings in the press.

Everything would be simpler if those “strategic leaks” were always done on the Kremlin’s order. But the Russian elite isn’t the monolithic entity some would like it to be, and the many competing group of interests inside the sistema regularly use the media to attack their opponents or publicize their grudges. The investigation on the death of opposition political Boris Nemstov was for example littered with leaks, that experts attributed to the exasperation of Russia’s security agencies to see Kadyrov, the infamous leader of Chechenya, being protected by higher-ups (suspects in the case of Nemstov’s death belonged to paramilitary organizations close to Kadyrov).

There is also always the possibility that a comment from an anonymous source is just that, an insight by an insider without any convoluted agenda. But how does one know which is which without being stuck into this state of permanent doubt that James Angleton, the chief of the counterintelligence staff at the CIA for much of the Cold War famously called the “wilderness of mirrors” ?

“We don’t know”

Of course, experience, studies in a relevant field, handling of the language and a good grasp of intelligence analysis can help. But they aren’t enough, argues Mark Galeotti in a piece dedicated to this very issue: in the end, “we rely on our own gut sense of “kak eto bylo,” how things were, and thus how they probably are and will be, and put together these bits and pieces in a pleasing pattern”. And if the British scholar disagreed with the Swedish economist about Ivanov’s dismissal, they both agree on one thing: “we don’t really know what’s going on”.