IF I WERE TO SIT DOWN AND CATALOGUE all of the abject lies Vladimir Putin has told over the span of his political career, it would take months to account for them all.
The latest lie? Just last weekend, Putin stated that Russia’s war against Ukraine is coming to an end. Some people believed that meant he was ready to make peace. Then, just a few days later, his barbarian army—there is no other way to describe a military so deeply unprofessional and as thoroughly committed to horrific war crimes—launched one of the biggest drone attacks against Ukrainian civilians since the war began.
Recall that when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin’s government foolishly believed that Russian troops would be greeted as liberators and Kyiv would fall within days.
Ever since, Putin and his barbarian horde have been scrambling to adjust the calculus.
Having failed to anticipate Ukraine’s fierce resistance, Putin has sought to hoodwink President Donald Trump to do his bidding, and he finds an unwitting ally in Vice President JD Vance. However, Trump is reliably unpredictable and has, at times, expressed frustration at how the war against Ukraine refuses to end. For their part, the Kremlin doesn’t like dealing with unpredictability, preferring to be the crazy party in any political relationship.
So it suits Putin to buy time by making repeated overtures toward peace. Such overtures are meaningless and will remain meaningless for some time. At best, Russia is hoping for a pause to re-arm and re-build before returning to its campaign to destroy the democratic nation of Ukraine.
Just how obvious of a liar is Putin? He used to say that he couldn’t take Kyiv in three days because then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson talked the Ukrainians out of surrendering (which, if you actually follow this conflict, the Ukrainians did not need to do) while pushing to prolong the war. Tucker Carlson helped spread this particular lie during his infamous softball interview with Putin.
Today he tells his people that the real reason is that French President Macron got on the telephone and talked him out of it.
This is just the tip of the iceberg as far as Putin’s opportunistic lying is concerned. For example, late last year, Putin literally phoned Donald Trump to balefully claim that Ukraine tried to bomb his Valdai residence.
The CIA immediately backed up the Ukrainians’ denials of this. Yet the lie was calculated to appeal to Trump’s emotional side; it’s Putin playing innocent all over again, as he did with invoking Macron and Boris Johnson. “See? I’m trying to play nice. I could destroy these pesky Ukrainians at any second, but I’m really, really trying to play nice.”
Putin’s lies are bold, aggressive, and in-your-face for a reason.
It’s hard to imagine how anyone still thought Putin’s word was trustworthy after the 1999 apartment bombings by “Chechen terrorists,” after the campaign “against ISIS” in Syria, and after Russian-aligned forces shot down a civilian airliner over Russian-separatist-controlled Ukraine using a Russian missile system because something something Ukraine’s fault.
The Putin regime is so completely authoritarian that forcing people believe obvious falsehoods is part of how it projects its power. The ultimate message is: We will do and say whatever we want.
Putin is a classic barbarian. Despite his proclivity for expensive European suits, Putin is a savage who belongs beyond the bounds of civilization. We already know he has no qualms about murder on a mass scale. Putin’s frenemies in China and India believed he was willing to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine strongly enough that they talked him out of it.
The real question we must ask is whether Putin thinks that Western powers are weak enough that, if the Chinese and Indian leaders changed their mind, he could get away with it.
I can’t imagine the bombastic and impulsive Trump standing by if Putin deploys a nuke. Yet with Vance whispering in his ear, the United States meekly demurring while Putin saber-rattles with the nuclear arsenal is a possibility the Kremlin can plausibly entertain.
When Democrats were in power, Putin counted on their cautiousness, and it served him well, with the Biden administration taking Putin’s repeated nuclear threats seriously and likely slow-walking military aid with Putin’s fictitious “red lines” in mind. The stakes are higher for him now since, if stories of Russian domestic discontent are to be believed, Putin is facing additional pressure at home. MAGA chaos and conservative Russophilia risk letting him get away with it.
The possibility of a nuclear strike remains remote, but we shouldn’t be fooled. Putin’s signaling is no plea for peace. He’s just trying to buy time for Russia’s military while framing Ukraine as an “aggressor” to manage Trump.
The only way real peace to be achieved is through Ukrainian perseverance and the collapse of domestic (or elite) support for Putin at home. Peace will never arrive because Russia’s dictator—disconnected as he is from reality—suddenly has a change of heart.
