“Every one of you knows, and I specially want to underline it … I did not discuss any of this with you before. I did not ask your opinion before. And this is happening spontaneously, because I wanted to hear your opinions without any preliminary preparation,” he said.

The appearance of Putin just a few hours later with his long, pre-prepared and wide-ranging speech made the claim this was all a real-time decision-making process even more implausible.

Many of Putin’s team give the impression of genuinely believing the propaganda narrative Russia has built to justify its continuing aggression against Ukraine. Valentina Matviyenko, the only woman on the security council, gave an elongated harangue cobbled together from the more outlandish talking points of Russian news bulletins: innocent Russia facing down the nefarious west, which was backing the “genocidal” Kyiv regime.

Not everyone was so enthusiastic: the prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, spoke briefly and drily, looking visibly uncomfortable. Not willing to let him off the hook without swearing fealty to the decision that was already inevitably on the way, Putin asked him directly whether he supported it; Mishustin mumbled that he did. Everyone was now publicly on record as supporting this move; nobody will be able to weasel out of it later and claim they put up a fight.