I cannot imagine that much ignorance.

The thing is, Putin has made a decision to never use Internet for anything. He has never done anything in it, because for him it’s a tool full of propaganda. His first contact with Internet was that his underlings were able to shape opinions across the globe extremely efficiently using Internet. He doesn’t want his brain to rot like that, so he absolutely refuses to use Internet.

Now, what sources exist for him, then? He doesn’t know what he is missing, so he is unaware of how pervasively all information exchange takes place over Internet.
Putin gets his information from TV-news, newspapers and from assistants that he has meticulously hand-picked, personally. He knows his own TV and newspapers are full of propaganda and therefore not very useful as sources. And he seems to honestly assume the same applies, to the same high extent, even, to foreign media as well. That means, he is basically left at his most trusted assistants for all information. He vets new recruits against the earlier ones: If the new one is telling things that are in agreement with what the older assistants, he can be trusted. If not, he has been compromised by American propaganda.

Also, it’s good to keep in mind where Putin comes from. He was the second child of a single-mother. The first child died, largely of hunger, during the siege of Leningrad. They had no food there, which meant that cannibalism was very common. You can figure out what happened to a child that died at a young age in that city. It’s either: He gets buried and another child starves. Or the other child is given food that will keep it alive. A single mother traumatized by such an experience, in post-war USSR in devastated northwestern USSR. No time for the child, really. The guy grew on the streets. And there’s nobody who doesn’t get traumatized by that kind of an experience.

Because of this personal history, Putin really believes deeply in the concept of thugs being able to trust other thugs. Because of his early development, where he has had to play the role of an adult at an age when he should still have been an innocent child for many more years, his brain is wired differently than that of an adult without a traumatic background. He truly does not understand that the people around him who lie to everyone else, also lie to him. And because of his vetting system, he has ended up hiring only assistants that coördinate their lies with the other assistants. If anyone steps away from the line and starts saying something different, Putin knows that the assistant has been compromised by CIA and fires him. And when Putin fires an assistant, that also means that the assistant’s children will lose their study places, etc. The family’s life will be derailed completely. That’s a type of a punishment for betrayal.

So, Putin seriously is entirely disconnected from real world actions. He gets information from his assistants, but has personally made sure that they all lie. And that they lie all the time. At the same time, Putin is giving orders that must be implemented verbatim. He gets information that there are 1000 soldiers in the centre of Pokrovsk and then he gives an order for 150 of them do some specific thing. And in reality there are 30 soldiers, and they are at the outskirts of Pokrovsk. Yet the command will be relayed and implemented verbatim. And then those 30 soldiers die for nothing.

I do not think “ignorance” is really the correct word for this phenomenon, though. So, in the end I do agree with you, in a way.