as someone who has personally known psychopathic narcissists, they lie without rational reason. the point is to lie. that’s the end goal. the individual lie doesn’t necessarily have an individual strategic gain. as far as i can tell, there are two purposes for constantly lying.

one, they get an internal sense of power. it’s like a pleasurable reward for them similar to the feeling a hungry person gets when they eat food. their brains are wired that way. two, it serves to keep others constantly confused and dependent on the narcissist for reality because if everything is disordered, then others can’t make sense of reality, so the narcissist has control over the narrative. think of Trump. lawyers have repeatedly argued successfully in court that he cannot testify because he cannot stop lying.

i’m not saying Putin is not lying in this case. what i’m arguing is that he doesn’t need a clear individual gain from a lie to lie. it could be part of a greater deranged strategy. we just can’t be sure.