PALM COAST, Fla. — A Florida man got pulled over for speeding in Palm Coast and used a rather unique excuse to explain himself.
In a video posted on Facebook by the Flagler County Sheriff's Office, a deputy approaches the man's car and asks him how fast he thinks he was driving.
"Forty?" the man replied. "Don't even. Fifty, fifty in a thirty," the deputy said.
The deputy told the man he saw him run a stop sign too. That's when he started throwing out a couple of typical excuses.
"I was looking at this thing," the man said while pointing at his dashboard. He went on to explain that he was trying to get his new car out of "sport mode."
"I literally saw you run the stop sign, make a left turn and then hop on the gas," the deputy said as the man repeatedly apologized.
Then, the man said he saw a car coming and he wanted to get out of the way. But, the deputy wasn't buying it.
That's when the real reason for the man speeding finally came out.
"To tell you the truth, guy, I just found out that Putin has just said he's gonna launch nuclear thermal war against the world," he said.
"I was trying to get back to my house to find out what's going on. I'm freaking out here, guy. Okay? I got people in the Ukraine."
In its video captioned "Putin Made Me Do It," the sheriff's office indicates that the whole encounter happened on Feb. 24 — the day Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.
As for whether the excuse worked? A sheriff's office spokesperson told The Miami Herald that mentioning the war in Ukraine didn't get the driver out of the ticket.