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“Did Putin really not know the truth because he was in an Ivory Tower surrounded by “Yes Men”?

That’s the most likely explanation in my view. Russia doesn’t have a government. It’s like the Five Families of the mafia managed to take over a country. Similar to Iraq under Saddam only bigger.
Oh, and with 6,000 nuclear weapons.

They’re all criminal thugs so everyone lies to everyone else while everyone is stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. And they’re working on the stuff that is nailed down.

So it’s no surprise that when they actually go to war everyone tells the Capo di Tutti Capi that everything is fine. No one dares tell him anything else. The next phase is the finger pointing followed by the executions.

It’s like Goodfellas only in Russian.

“Did Putin really not know the truth because he was in an Ivory Tower surrounded by “Yes Men”?”

My thought is that he did not know the truth because he was in an Ivory Tower surrounded by Xi’s men.

China’s influence in Russia is much greater then even it’s influence in the US.

China gains so much from this idiocy in Ukraine by both sides.

[The Soviets were pretty damn formidable with the Red Army and conquered Eastern Europe in 1945 and now they are this pathetic?]

At the end, they were on their last legs. Patton was probably right - invading Russia would have been like pushing on an open door. The problem was that no one wanted to open that particular can of worms. There’s a ton of myth-making re just about every aspect of every battle, and that applies to WWII. One account had Khalkin Gol as this complete wipeout of the Japanese units involved. In reality, Soviet archives, opened up for a time, until Putin ended that access, described a more sobering truth, that Russian losses exceeded their Japanese counterparts despite overwhelming Russian numerical, equipment and supply advantages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Soviet_assessment
[Following the battle, the Soviets generally found the results unsatisfactory, despite their victory. Though the Soviet forces in the Far East in 1939 were not plagued by fundamental issues to the same extent as those in Europe during the 1941 campaigns, their generals were still unimpressed by their army’s performance. As noted by Pyotr Grigorenko, the Red Army went in with a very large advantage in technology, numbers, and firepower, yet still suffered huge losses, which he blamed on poor leadership.[29]

Although their victory and the subsequent negotiation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact secured the Far East for the duration of the Soviet-German War, the Red Army always remained cautious about the possibility of another, larger Japanese incursion as late as early 1944. In December 1943, when the American military mission proposed a logistics base be set up east of Lake Baikal, the Red Army authorities were according to Coox “shocked by the idea and literally turned white”.[73] Due to this caution, the Red Army kept a large force in the Far East even during the bleakest days of the war in Europe. For example, on July 1, 1942, Soviet forces in the Far East consisted of 1,446,012 troops, 11,759 artillery pieces, 2,589 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 3,178 combat aircraft.[74] Despite this, the Soviet operations chief of the Far Eastern Front, General A. K. Kazakovtsev, was not confident in his army group’s ability to stop an invasion if the Japanese committed to it (at least in 1941–1942), commenting: “If the Japanese enter the war on Hitler’s side ... our cause is hopeless.”[75]]

[Did Putin really not know the truth because he was in an Ivory Tower surrounded by “Yes Men”? ]

Re information - the reason he is withdrawing these units from around Kiev is because he understands the alternative is death or capture, if they stay where they are. So he is getting decent updates. The big reason he invaded is because he thought psy ops would prevent him from having to fight much of a war. If the % of Ukrainians who supported him matched the % of Freepers who do, he’d have achieved his victory on the timetable he set out early on.

[Did Putin really not know the truth because he was in an Ivory Tower surrounded by “Yes Men”? ]

There might also be an element of maskirovka involved in the way Zelensky got Putin to send his light forces ahead to attempt to link up with his supposedly bought and paid for collaborators. Remember the way Zelensky kept saying the Russians weren’t going to invade? That may have been a way to catch the Russians off-guard re Ukrainian preparedness. There’s no way the Ukrainians could hold them off in face-to-face battle with large conventional armies on both sides, given the hardware disparity. What they needed to do was deprive the Russians of mass, which they did, by letting them in. Giving ground to get the Russians to disperse and make themselves vulnerable was extremely costly for Ukrainian civilians and the cities they lived in that were captured, but for large Ukrainian formations to face the Russians en masse would have been suicide.