Over the weekend, very amateurish fake footage of a series of supposed attacks by Ukraine on the Donbas republics was broadcast. Local leaders tweeted news of terror strikes that had not yet happened. Fake news has been a Russian speciality for years, of course. But “what’s surprising is they haven’t got any better at doing it,” Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative site Bellingcat, told the Guardian. “In some ways they have got worse.”

That raises a question: who was the real target audience for this series of obviously staged charades? Credulous, older Russian TV viewers — or Russian TV’s most devoted viewer of all, Vladimir Putin? Putin is usually portrayed as an omnipotent master manipulator. But it’s also entirely possible that he is being manipulated by the many hawks in his entourage — notably defense minister Sergei Shoigu and Federation Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev. The Kremlin, as the Russians say, has many towers.

Ultimately we will never know exactly what prompted Putin to make his impetuous decision to recognize the Donbas republics. And then, two days later, to send in the tanks and bombers. There was a brief interlude that Putin, teetering on the very brink, still appeared to preserve the strategic ambiguity that has been the hallmark of this career. Was formalizing the presence of Russian troops in areas that had been de facto independent of Kyiv’s control since 2014 an actual invasion or not? The US said it was. The EU wasn’t so sure. The usual suspects — notably Hungary’s president and long-standing Putin ally Viktor Orbán resisted EU moves to impose sanctions. It was the last moment when the old, Machiavellian Putin, past master of divide and rule, was visible. Then he plunged on in a rain of fire and steel.