Watching Vladimir Putin Thursday at his year-end press conference , one is tempted to ask whether the Russian president has gone mad. Here is a man leading a country that in the last few months has amassed tens of thousands of soldiers and advanced military equipment on Ukraine’s border, now asserting that it is Ukraine which is planning an invasion of Russia. Putin claimed (without evidence) that the U.S. intends to arm Ukraine with hypersonic missiles. “They just have to understand that we have nowhere left to retreat,” Putin said. Peter Pomerantsev, the author of the 2014 book “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” on the nature of Russian disinformation, told me that Putin sometimes deliberately acts crazy as a way to gain leverage with his adversaries. Launching a new war against Ukraine would indeed be risky for Russia, in part because Ukraine’s own military is better than […]