When Vladimir Putin went on international television during his army’s annexation of Crimea, and asserted, with a smirk, that there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea when everyone knew there were, and then just as casually later admitted that they had been there, and even publicly awarded medals to the soldiers whom he had earlier said hadn’t been there, he wasn’t so much lying in the sense of trying to replace one reality with another as saying that facts don’t matter.
