As the situation in Crimea grew  increasingly tense over the past few weeks, many in Western Europe and the U.S. began to wonder what exactly Russian President Vladimir Putin was thinking. German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly said he was “in another world,” while Julia Ioffe of the New Republic wrote that he had “lost it.” As Anne Applebaum of The Post tweeted, “we may have reached the weird moment when the dictator believes his own propaganda.”