On Monday's edition of CNN's "OutFront," former CIA official John Sipher, who headed up Russian counterintelligence, said that Vladimir Putin is becoming unmoored from reality and paranoid of those around him in the leadup to his planned invasion of Ukraine.
"I know you saw, but anyone who didn't see Putin's address to the Russian nation tonight did not see the room," said anchor Erin Burnett, showing an image of Putin sitting at the far end of a large chamber with everyone else on the far side. "This was when he was speaking to his security council, before the actual address to the nation ... in light of that long table we saw the other day, which applied to certain presidents, not all, not one who took a Russian PCR test, these are all Russian PCRed people who are in the inner circle of Putin, so that can't be the excuse. What do you make of it?"
"Yeah, there's been a lot of reports that Putin is getting more and more paranoid," said Sipher. "He's obviously been cracking down domestically for the last six months to a year quite a bit, there's been stories about people visiting and have to wait in quarantine for weeks to go visit him. You know, you're a dictator for twenty years, you worry about not dying in your sleep as an old man."
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Sipher then added that he's increasingly worried that Putin now believes his own propaganda.
"I assumed when I heard that speech that Putin knows that his lies are lies," added Sipher. "But listening to him today, it sounds like he really believes his own BS, it's like a Russian version of QAnon stuff, and that's scary because if he actually believes this stuff, it's hard to negotiate with crazy."
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