Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is entering its fifth year. But the war was much longer in the making – and the West’s failure to understand Vladimir Putin’s worldview has made it much harder to stop.
For four years, I have researched the reasons why the hope that came with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 led first to humiliation, and then hatred: a hatred that has rained down in a storm of bombardment on the cities, towns and villages across Ukraine.
Putin is determined to go down in history as the leader who made Russians proud by standing up to the West, and in his view regaining the respect – or at least the fear – that was once enjoyed by the Soviet Union.
The Return of Russia: from Yeltsin to Putin, the Story of a Vengeful Kremlin, my latest book, shows in detail how the West failed to understand the possible consequences of the humiliation that Russia experienced at the end of the Cold War.
As the USSR contracted in the late 1980s, Putin, who served as an intelligence officer in East Germany, was among those to make the journey back eastwards.
In a telling interview in 2000, not long after he was first elected president, Putin said when he returned home, the KGB offered him another job. He said no. “I knew there was no future to the system. The country didn’t have a future. And it would have been very difficult to sit inside the system and wait for it all to collapse around me,” he said.
Putin understood the humiliation – and also its political potential.
Soviet citizens queuing in front of a store in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, in December 1990 during the economic turmoil at the end of the USSR (Photo: Serguei/AFP)Aided by rising oil prices, he presided over better domestic living standards. The trade-off was a loss of political freedom, but most Russians didn’t seem to mind. When later some did, they found it was too late.
Domestic matters dealt with, Putin planned for Russia’s return to the international stage, which has involved growing friendships with authoritarian regimes in countries like Iran and North Korea, hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, and Russian troops pursing military campaigns far from its borders.
If Putin understood the political potential of Russia’s time of humiliation, Western policymakers failed to understand the risks it represented to them.
The warnings were on full display as the invasion of Ukraine approached. In 2020, and again in 2021, Putin gave the world long history lessons in the form of essays on the Soviet Union’s role in the defeat of Nazi Germany and ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’.
Putin argued that Ukraine as a separate nation was a product of the Soviet era, and that “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia”. What “partnership” meant in this case was conquest, which was attempted months later. The war continues to this day, with potentially two million dead and wounded.
Putin still seems to believe that things are going his way. There are problems for Russia, however – and these mean that he needs to keep on fighting.
The site of a Russian strike on Kyiv on 22 February, 2026 (Photo: Oleksandr Magula/Suspilne Ukraine/Global Images Ukraine)Alexandra Prokopenko and Alexander Kolyandr, in a recent article, spelled out how Russia is so firmly on a war footing that “abrupt demilitarization will crash the economy”. Then there’s the issue of returning soldiers, some of them deeply traumatised. After the war they could pose a challenge for a Russian society ill-equipped to provide them with healthcare or jobs.
So Putin’s war goes on.
The West’s big mistake in the 1990s was to imagine that Russia would always agree to the role it was assigned in the post-Cold War era; that it was no longer at the top table of superpower politics and should be happy being a bit-part-player on the global stage.
This was a major failure to understand how Putin and many of his compatriots saw the world beyond their borders.
Fiona Hill, who advised Barack Obama and then Donald Trump during his first term, told me in an interview that, when it comes to Putin, “we keep losing his plot”.
After the Salisbury poisonings in 2018, when former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with Novichok, then UK defence secretary Gavin Williamson said that Russia should “go away and shut up”.
It would not and has not – and now represents the biggest threat to overall European security.
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Even if there is a ceasefire in Ukraine this year, the conflict will not be over. The West made the mistake of ignoring the possible consequences of Russia’s “time of humiliation”. That caused the resentment that Putin decided would eventually mean war.
With Russian society militarised, we in the West must now be prepared to live with – and counter – that threat.
James Rodgers is the author of The Return of Russia: from Yeltsin to Putin, the story of a Vengeful Kremlin (2026). He is a former correspondent in Moscow, Brussels and Gaza
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