That's what I was wondering, but the article makes it sound like that's not the case. The story is essentially that an FSB whistleblower was concerned that plans were being put into place to attack Japan, and that the propaganda warefare front was already underway. Now, my understanding from the FSB leaks this spring is that analysts in the Russian intelligence apparatus are given a lot of strange analytical tasks and have very little visibility into the greater context. For instance, analysts making risk analyses for a hypothetical Ukraine invasion claimed to not know they were delivering analyses on an imminent event, nor did their bosses, so they were told to just write positive predictions and move on with their work.

It would be interesting to see if we find out more on this and see if the whistleblower was really seeing what he thought he was seeing, or if it was something more mundane.