They were emailing each other using Gmail and texting on their iPhone, even without things like Salt Typhoon it shouldn't be exactly hard for a competent intelligence agency from China or Russia to know pretty much everything we now do, and probably alot more.Putin was a former high ranking KGB agent so it doesn't surprise me that he knew more prior to the release of the epstein files then the average person.
Also probably gave a huge amount of legitimacy to the Ukraine war at least to Putin.
