Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday accused Western intelligence services, specifically the CIA, of advising Ukraine on how to assassinate a senior Russian propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov.

While Putin said his Federal Security Service disrupted the plot against Solovyov, the evidence for the plot’s existence is far from convincing. After all, an FSB officer appears to have signed a supposedly incriminatory note by one of the would-be assassins with “signature unclear” rather than an actually ineligible signature. More ludicrously, as Tim McMillan observed, the FSB also appears to have misunderstood an instruction to buy three cellphone SIM cards. Instead, someone bought three copies of the computer game, “The Sims.”