Putin is losing his battle with reality

In the last few days, Putin gave one of the weirdest interviews I’ve seen in a long time.

He sat there staring past the man in front of him, clearly reading from a screen, rattling through tiny villages, rivers and battlefield positions that almost nobody in Russia could point to on a map.

And the whole thing felt strange.

It didn’t sound like a leader confidently explaining a war. It sounded like a man either being fed completely wrong information, or just saying whatever he needed to say to keep the fantasy alive.

That matters, because Ukraine’s recent long-range strikes into Crimea may have shaken something much deeper. Crimea is not just another piece of occupied territory for Putin. It is his trophy. His symbol. His great imperial prize in the Black Sea.

So what happens when that starts to look vulnerable?

To understand this properly, I spoke to Anne Applebaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist who has spent decades studying authoritarianism, Soviet history, propaganda and the mindset of regimes like Putin’s.

We talked about what is happening inside Russia, why Putin seems so trapped inside his own war, and what these strange public performances might tell us about the state of the Kremlin.

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Right now, we are heading east from Kyiv for a new frontline report on what is happening outside the capital. Hit the notification bell if you want to see that when it drops.

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