"The truth is on our side and truth is strength!" Vladimir Putin boomed into a microphone on Red Square last week, after a grand ceremony at which he proclaimed four large chunks of Ukrainian territory to be part of Russia.
"Victory will be ours!"
But in the real world, things look very different.
Even as Russia's president signed his illegal annexation treaties in the Kremlin, Ukrainian forces were advancing inside the areas he had just seized.
Hundreds of thousands of men have been fleeing Russia rather than be drafted to fight in an expanding war.
And things are going so badly on the battlefield that Mr Putin and his loyalists are now reframing what they once claimed was the "de-Nazification" of Ukraine and the protection of Russian speakers as an existential fight against the entire "collective" West.
That is the truth and none of it is on Russia's side.
Victim of his system
"He's in a blind zone. It seems he's not really seeing what's happening," the editor of Riddle Russia, Anton Barbashin, argues of Russia's president.
Like many, the political analyst believes that Mr Putin was caught completely off-guard by strong Western support for Kyiv, as well as Ukraine's own fierce resistance to occupation.
As he turns 70 today, after more than 20 years in power, it seems Russia's leader has become a victim of his own system. His autocratic style is impeding his access to sound intelligence.
