Back during the Kimberlin saga, a fella whose name rhymes with Steel Bowhowser used to harass me and my family incessantly under thinly disguised accounts. One could not prove him to be behind the accounts, but it always seemed to me that he deliberately left breadcrumbs. Like Olenna Tyrell, he wanted his antagonist to know it was him.

It seems Vladimir Putin is following the same playbook.

Many people have remarked about how bad the propaganda is that Putin has been spreading, supposedly showing aggression by Ukraine. It’s like he doesn’t care that it’s not believable. Odd, that.

Now, he announces an invasion, days after holding a bizarre session with his top aides that was supposedly geared towards “deciding” whether to “recognize” two sections of Ukraine that his hand-picked stooges had declared to be “independent.” Yet in his announcement, he is wearing the same suit and tie he wore in the bizarre Monday session. And the metadata from the new announcement shows it was recorded on Monday:

Russia’s independent Ekho Moskvi Radio (Echo of Moscow) reports that Putin’s speech about the beginning of the “military operation” was recorded on February 21st. He is wearing same tie.
“Confirmed by downloading video from Kremlin web-page and checking metadata” – tweet says. https://t.co/UqPE9VCE8t

— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) February 24, 2022

He’s not trying that hard. He wants you to know he planned this ahead of time.