WASHINGTON — After decades of getting schooled in information warfare by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the United States is trying to beat the master at his own game.

In recent weeks, the Biden administration has detailed the movement of Russian special operation forces to Ukraine’s borders, exposed a Russian plan to create a video of a faked atrocity as a pretext for an invasion, outlined Russia’s war plans, warned that an invasion would result in possibly thousands of deaths and hinted that Russian officers had doubts about Putin.

On Friday, Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters at the White House that the United States was seeing signs of Russian escalation and that there was a “credible prospect” of immediate military action. Other officials said the announcement was prompted by new intelligence that signaled an invasion could begin as soon as Wednesday.

The series of disclosures — unfolding almost as quickly as information is collected and assessed — has amounted to one of the most aggressive releases of intelligence by the United States since the Cuban missile crisis, current and former officials say.

It is an unusual strategy, in part because Biden has repeatedly made clear that he has no intention of sending U.S. troops to defend Ukraine. In effect, the administration is warning the world of an urgent threat — not to make the case for a war, but to try to prevent one.

The hope is that disclosing Putin’s plans will disrupt them, perhaps delaying an invasion and buying more time for diplomacy or even giving Putin a chance to reconsider the political, economic and human costs of an invasion.

At the same time, Biden administration officials said they had a narrower and more realistic goal: They want to make it more difficult for Putin to justify an invasion with lies, undercutting his standing on the global stage and building support for a tougher response.

Intelligence agencies, prodded by the Biden administration, have declassified information, which in turn has been briefed to Congress, shared with reporters and discussed by Pentagon and State Department spokespeople.

But the disclosures are complicated by history. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush administration released intelligence that officials said justified preemptive action, including purported intercepts of Iraqi military conversations, photos of mobile biological weapons labs and statements accusing Baghdad of building a fleet of drones to launch a chemical attack on the United States. The material was all wrong, reliant on sources who lied, incorrect interpretations of Iraq’s actions and senior officials who looked at raw intelligence and saw what they wanted to see.

But this situation, U.S. officials say, is different. U.S. claims about Russia’s troop buildup have been confirmed by commercial satellite imagery of a quality previously unavailable. The details of Russia’s secret disinformation plots are in line with the Kremlin’s propaganda campaigns that play out on social media platforms and have been tracked by independent researchers.

Most important, the officials said, there is a fundamental distinction between Iraq in 2003 and Ukraine in 2022. “In Iraq, intelligence was used and deployed from this very podium to start a war,” Sullivan said Friday.

“We are trying to stop a war.”

The last time Russia moved against Ukraine, in 2014, intelligence officials blocked the Obama administration from sharing what they knew. But the Biden administration has studied those mistakes. The new disclosures reflect the influence of Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, and William Burns, the CIA director, who have shown a willingness to declassify information in an effort to disrupt Russian planning, administration officials said.

“We have learned a lot, especially since 2014, about how Russia uses the information space as part of its overall security and military apparatus,” said Emily Horne, spokesperson for the National Security Council.

“And we have learned a lot about how to deny them some impact in that space.”

One U.S. intelligence official said that when the country’s spy agencies have information that could help the world make better judgments about Russian activity, it should be released, as long as the government can avoid exposing how the information was collected or who passed it along.

It is, according to some strategists, a full-fledged information battle.

“I think it is great,” said Beth Sanner, a former top intelligence official who regularly briefed former President Donald Trump.

“My guess is that these disclosures are freaking the Kremlin and the security services out. And, more important, it can narrow Putin’s options and make him think twice.”

The Ukrainian government has expressed unease with the U.S. disclosures. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that “too much information” about a possible Russian offensive was sowing unnecessary fear.

For all the disclosures, the Biden administration has provided no evidence of the disinformation plots that it says have been uncovered.

Intelligence officials have argued that sharing details would give Russia clues to how they work. That, in turn, would allow Russia to “plug the leaks” and would amount to disarming in the middle of an information war, officials said.

Those concerns show how difficult it is for any democracy to go toe-to-toe with an autocratic state like Russia.

Unconstrained by truth, the Kremlin is simply better at such unconventional warfare.

“Remember, Vladimir Putin is a KGB guy. He doesn’t think like Biden does,” said Daniel Hoffman, a former Moscow station chief for the CIA. “Putin comes from Mars, and Biden’s from Venus. Vladimir Putin is playing his own game, and his chess games may be a little different than ours.”

During many of his recent military forays, Putin has used disinformation to create doubt about what he is doing.

Such tactics have slowed international responses and allowed Putin to more easily achieve his aims. When masked men began taking over government buildings in Crimea in February 2014, Russia said they were part of a locally led pro-Russian uprising. Only after Crimea was taken over was it clear the “little green men” were Russian military forces.

Showing its ease with information warfare, Moscow responded quickly after Biden administration officials warned lawmakers this month about the enormous possible human costs if Putin launched a full invasion.

“Madness and scaremongering continues,” Russia’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitry Polyansky, wrote last Saturday on Twitter.

Some strategists believe the United States could be more aggressive. The United States or its allies could release information about Putin’s top lieutenants, for example, or the oligarchs who support him. That could sow doubt about people’s loyalty or expose their wealth.

“The new rules of war favor autocracies because they can do all these things well: They can fight sneaky and dirty,” said Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who has written about the changing nature of war. “The question is, what do we risk as a democracy by fighting this way? How does a democracy fight a secret war, if you will, without losing its democratic soul?”