“Every day, Putin’s site gets attacked by tens of thousands of hackers. Many of these attacks can be traced to U.S. territory. It’s not as though we accuse the White House or Langley of doing it each time it happens,” Putin’s spokesman said last week, using a nickname for CIA headquarters.

This telling of the story neatly excludes a couple of facts.

State-dominated media in Russia frequently do accuse the U.S. of involving itself in Russian affairs, and Putin’s allies in the Russian parliament have demonized foreign countries and nonprofit organizations linked to them through new legislation targeting “foreign agents” ― a label increasingly used against anyone criticizing the Russian government.

One of Russia’s top complaints, the expansion of NATO into former Soviet countries, occurred because Russia’s neighbors sought NATO support ― not because of a CIA plot. A critical element of Putin’s story about NATO is the claim that the West had promised not to expand the alliance ― an allegation that former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev and various officials have said is untrue.