Agent of chaos: How to read Putin’s lies, U-turns and retreats

According to Emily Ferris, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, Putin’s thinly-veiled nuclear threats over the past few weeks were a way “of escalating to test the waters and see what the response would be.”... Ferris said the decision to invade Ukraine was probably made at the last minute, which would be “quite in keeping with Putin’s tendency to put off big decisions.” And when it comes to operational matters there’s an underlying “general incompetence and inefficiency among security establishment in Russia which shouldn’t be understated,” she said. “Putin sometimes is kept out of the loop of the details,” forcing him to intervene subsequently, she added.