Preemptive, public US strikes winning intelligence war with Russia: ANALYSIS

ABC News spoke with experts about the calculated release of U.S. intelligence.

For years, the Kremlin's power to weave disinformation into a believable narrative was a seemingly ever-present boogeyman, threatening to disrupt elections and sew discord thousands of miles away from Moscow.

Then, as Russia prepared to invade Ukraine, the tide started to turn.

From the time the Kremlin claimed the troop buildup on its neighbor's border was simply a training exercise, the U.S. has been able to turn one of its powerful assets -- classified intelligence -- into an effective tool by making it public, undercutting Russian forces before they could carry out their next moves.

CIA Director Bill Burns explained the administration's approach in a speech at Georgia Tech on Thursday, saying that at President Joe Biden's direction, the U.S. government had taken "unprecedented steps to declassify intelligence and use it publicly to preempt the false narratives" spun by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, making it harder to "obscure the truth of his unprovoked and vicious aggression."