Vladimir Putin belongs to that category of world leaders who lie all the time. His lies may not be as flamboyant as those of his American counterpart, but they can be just as outlandish. In his state-of-the-federation speech, on Thursday, Putin told some howlers about demographics, the social safety net, and Russian military might. He got a lot of applause, especially when he declared that the world would have to listen to Russia, now that the nation had armed itself to the teeth.

As with all Russian political rituals, this speech wasn’t what its name implied, or what it might have seemed. The country’s constitution requires the President to report back to parliament on an annual basis, but last year Putin skipped the address altogether. This year’s speech was not so much a report—after all, the parliament reports to Putin, not the other way around—as a stump speech. On March 18th, Russia will hold an event that it calls an election, which it isn’t, considering that its execution is tightly controlled, and its outcome is preordained. But, still, an “election” day has a way of focussing Russian politics, or what passes for politics, in response to the perceived threat to Putin’s continued power.

Where might such a threat come from? Obviously not from Russian voters; their actual votes are separated from the outcome of the so-called election by layers of bureaucrats, who insure that the vote outcome matches the perceived expectations of their higher-ups. Nor does the threat come from Russian opposition activists, most of whom have been killed, jailed, or forced into exile. The threat, judging from Putin’s speech, comes from the United States.

For the first hour and ten minutes of his speech, Putin seemed bored by the entire exercise: he droned on, looking down at the prepared text, frequently doubling back to correct a word he’d misread. But, when he got to the security section of the talk, Putin became animated—to the extent that he is capable of becoming animated. In the next forty-seven minutes, as he extolled the successes of the Russian arms industry, Putin looked up at the audience frequently, added words for emphasis, showed video clip after video clip, and often paused for applause. This was the heart of his speech.

The narrative he offered has long been familiar. In this story, Russia was badly wounded by losing its Soviet colonies; was further slighted by the West, which refused to take it seriously; and is now staging a comeback as a superpower. Some of the details were new: Putin claimed that Russia had developed and tested several kinds of weapons, including nuclear ones, that the rest of the world still sees only in its wildest dreams. To illustrate the point, Putin showed a computer animation of missiles hitting the coast of Florida. (This video, as some Russian journalists quickly noticed, was itself not new; it was first shown on Russian state television in 2007.) Putin noted that he couldn’t show pictures of the actual missiles, presumably because they are top-secret. Military experts on both sides of the Atlantic have suggested that another reason they couldn’t be shown is that they do not exist.

Whether the weapons exist, though, is entirely beside the point. A fake state-of-the-federation report, on the eve of a fake election, filled with false statements on a variety of topics, does not even pretend to describe reality; rather, it provides a direct look at the speaker’s imagination. In Putin’s view of the world, Russia is facing an existential threat, and this threat emanates from the United States. Putin believes that the threat has grown in recent months. While Americans debate whether—and to what extent—their President is the Russian President’s puppet, Putin sees Trump as an aggressive and unpredictable adversary. In the year since Trump became President, the United States has increased the number of Russians who are under sanctions; functional diplomatic relations between the two countries have been stripped to a minimum; and America’s nuclear posture has grown distinctly more aggressive. Putin cited President Trump’s national-security strategy, which he sees as setting a lower bar for a first nuclear strike than does the Russian military doctrine. (This point is debatable.) Putin stressed—as he has before, but with even greater force, and at greater length—that Russia will not hesitate to defend itself with nuclear weapons.

The Russian President, in other words, is campaigning on the promise of nuclear annihilation. Whether or not the new weapons he described in this stump speech are real is immaterial; the old ones are more than sufficient to cause a nuclear holocaust.