From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is the Daily.

As the world has waited to see whether Russia will or will not invade Ukraine and with early

signs that an invasion may now have begun, much of the uncertainty has hinged on the question

of what exactly Vladimir Putin is thinking. Today, my colleague Anton Choyanovsky says that

the answer may lie in an unusual speech that Putin delivered on Monday night.

It's Wednesday, February 23rd.

And on set the scene for us as this major speech from Vladimir Putin gets underway.

Well, it's almost 10 p.m. in Moscow on Monday night when state television breaks into regular

programming and shows Putin sitting in the Kremlin in a nondescript wood paneled office,

Russian flags behind him a bank of telephones to his left.

And he starts to deliver a speech that's certainly the most remarkable speech I've seen him give

in the time I've been in Moscow.

Why? You know, it was this emotion, the sense of grievance, even this anger that you could see

breaking through again and again as he spoke for almost an hour and that we haven't seen

to this degree in Putin's public appearances over the years. You would see flashes of it,

but to have him speaking to an hour addressing the nation on national television in prime time,

it was really something something new, something different.

And at a very high level, Anton, what is the goal of this speech?

Well, that's another thing that made this speech so remarkable is that tensions were so incredibly high.

You had the sense that after months of buildup, Putin would finally reveal his plans for Ukraine,

was he going to invade? What goals was he pursuing? And leading up to this, there was a lot of tension

and the Kremlin had really left this question wide open. What did Putin actually want? And there was a sense,

...