At 10 p.m. local time Monday evening Russian state television broke from regular programming to broadcast an address by Putin to the nation. That is this video, in which he announces recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk. I skipped more than I watched. 

My first impression was Putin's odd body language, he leaned back sitting in his chair. He maintained that posture for the entire 59+ minutes of his address. It instantly reminded me of the more exaggerated, casual body language of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi in his disastrous speech to the people of Libya in 2011. 

Second impression, Putin looked puffy (if I can tell); later in watching I appended bloated to puffy. 

Third: He did not look angry, that I could tell. That changed near the end, at approximately 52:00, when he began talking about Ukraine's "provocations" that led up to the independence/annexation decisions. 

Fourth, Putin cleared his throat repeatedly throughout the broadcast. Didn't think much of it the first several times he did it but he did it so often that it was impossible to write off. I skipped from about 6' to about 39' I am embarrassed to say, so in those first six minutes I noticed the physical things I've mentioned and they were still there when I went back at about 39'. He did not not have water on the desk in front of him.

At 40:40 he begins talking about his "grievances", as the New York Times calls them, against America. He mentions Jim Baker's promise not to expand NATO "an inch eastward." At 41:40 he states that in the late '90's and early 2000's "relations between Russia and the West were at high levels", meaning good, friendly, which is true.

Then I noticed something else, at 42:10-43:42. This is as I wrote it in my notes: 

"We proposed the Russia-NATO Council. I will say one thing that I have never said in public. I will say for the first time (exhales audibly, as in exasperation), back in 2000 when President Bill Clinton was visiting Moscow at the end of his term I asked how would America see Russia joining NATO. I would not give you all of the details of that conversation but the result of my conversation (?looped? unintelligible) (clears throat)...You can see it in practical steps...withdrawing from the previous arms treaties and so on and so forth." (inhales deeply, exhales loudly). [At this point I wondered if he didn't have a cold, or COVID. The odd, casual, leaning-back sitting posture could be fatigue.)

I saw no "hatred". This was not his Security Council speech where he "humiliated" and "bullied"his advisers (I will find that one and watch it or parts of it tomorrow.).  I saw an obsessed man, one maybe physically unwell. All that he said about America and NATO was, to my knowledge, true, but he leaves out the most important part: Neither America nor NATO ever attacked Russia. That should have taken the sting out of any paranoid obsession that Russia was being threatened. Disrespected, distrusted, ignored, not friendly, yes indeed. But threatened: as President Clinton said often, "That dog won't hunt." There is no justification for Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Nikto.