My key takeaways: In recent years, Putin has surrounded himself only with a small number of like-minded security officials, a habit that intensified during the

My key takeaways: In recent years, Putin has surrounded himself only with a small number of like-minded security officials, a habit that intensified during the pandemic, when he isolated himself to an extreme degree compared with other world leaders “They thought Russia would come and, like a time machine, give them the chance to live as they did before.” Acrude military logic underpinned Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, Putin believed, was not a country with its own history and claim to independence but a territory cobbled together from Austria-Hungary and the former Russian Empire by the Bolsheviks “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.”