Informed

"On 5 June, Red Army staff officers told their American counterparts again they were ‘almost certain’ that Hitler was dead and that his body had been identified. Four days later, however, the Soviet commander Georgii Zhukov issued a denial on Stalin’s instructions. Why did Stalin brush aside the reports of his own front-line troops? The reason was political: for the Soviet leader, the claim that Hitler was still alive bolstered his argument that it was necessary to be tough on the Germans in case there was a revival of Nazism. The Soviet leader wanted to scotch Dönitz’s claim that Hitler had died a hero’s death by portraying him as a coward who had fled the scene of his defeat and was skulking in some corner or other of the world, like a criminal trying to evade his responsibilities. " (footnote-3: ...There is no evidence for the claim by Daly-Groves, Hitler’s Death, p. 93, that it was not political factors but embarrassment about the poor quality of the Soviet investigation that informed Stalin’s announcement that Hitler was alive.) (Richard J. Evans, The Hitler Conspiracies-The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination)

What does "informed" mean here?