To understand Putin’s situation, recall the attack that began on February 24, 2022. He called it a “special military operation” not merely to play it down for propaganda purposes. That is how he saw it. In his mind, Ukraine did not really exist: it was just a chunk of Russia that had fallen to “Nazis”.
For more than 15 years, he had been delegitimising Ukraine. For eight, he had held Crimea and parts of the Donbas. He was emboldened by how little the West seemed to mind and how preoccupied we were by our self-lacerating “civilisational” decline over subjects like Black Lives Matter. He was delighted by President Joe Biden’s shocking overnight scuttle from Afghanistan. For Putin to say he was “invading” Ukraine would have meant admitting its independence. Besides, he expected its leadership to fold. So, a “special military operation” was all that was needed.
Only five weeks later, however, Putin had to turn his tanks round before the gates of Kyiv. At about that time, I was talking to ex-Air Marshal Edward Stringer, now at the think-tank Policy Exchange. “I think,” he told me, “that Putin has already lost this war.”
He did not mean that Russia would not go on fighting or that the Nato allies, led by the United States, would respond decisively. But Putin’s coup de main had failed. With that failure, his entire concept – military, political, optical – crumbled. His wrong history had led him to expect Ukrainian people to welcome Russian troops with flags.
Putin had been right, perhaps, that the instinct of the West after a lightning invasion would be to wail but let him have his way. President Zelensky’s famous refusal of a ride out changed all that. Putin accidentally forged the spirit of the nation he sought to obliterate.