How many people do you know whose formative experience was an encounter with a rat? And of those, how many like to tell that story again and again?
Enter Vladimir Putin, who signed off on an official biography in which a hallway rat becomes the origin story of a poor but strong-willed kid growing up in the communal apartments – the Soviet projects – of Leningrad. Two decades of Western analysis dutifully followed: the judo black belt, a spook who never forgot what rats do when they have nowhere left to run.
To Moscow’s delight, our most esteemed Kremlinologists turned a pest-control incident into profound geopolitical insight. Memorable but entirely useless.
Steeped in celebrity culture, we can’t resist mythologizing Putin: the empty-eyed KGB operative, the man who resurrected Russia from the ruins of the Soviet collapse, and wants us to treat it as a superpower again. This folklore is seductive. Alas, Putin, a wanted war criminal, is as ordinary as Russian despots come.
Geopolitics of identity: why Russia cannot help but invade
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February 18, 2025
Since 2014, the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war, one phrase still haunts me: “Они распяли мальчика в трусиках”—they [Ukrainians] crucified a little boy wearing nothing but his underwear. It sounds grotesque, like something torn from the pages of a macabre fairytale. It never happened, of course. But for the vast majority of people living in Russia, it …
In 1961, Hannah Arendt watched Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem and came away not with a portrait of a bloodthirsty sociopath, but of a bureaucrat. A cog in the machine rather than a singular villain. We failed to heed that insight in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Strip away the rat story, the spy patina, and what remains is the banality of Putin.
Consider the evidence.
Ivan the Terrible (1547–1584) created Muscovy’s first secret police, the oprichnina, to whip nobility into submission. Surely, Ivan was waging wars of conquest in defense of Holy Russia. He had no qualms about brutalizing his own people, for this was the path to “greatness.” Putin praised Ivan as a “gatherer of Russian lands,” never mentioning that they belonged to other peoples – Tatars, Maris – whom Moscow promptly resettled, murdered, starved, or conscripted into the next war.
Peter the Great (1682–1725) looked west, liked what he saw, and set about modernizing his backward empire – on serf bones. He launched the Great Northern War to assert Russia’s place among the great powers, funding his ambitions on the windfall of expanding trade revenues. In June 2022, Putin compared his invasion of Ukraine directly to Peter’s conquests. “We are also returning our own” – a line as trite as it is mendacious.
Nicholas I (1825–1855) censored everything, suppressed minorities, established the Third Section – precursor to the KGB – and launched the Crimean War in pursuit of regional hegemony he saw as his birthright. The West called him the “gendarme of Europe” and fancied the Russian military unstoppable. Nicholas lost, badly, and died watching his hubris collapse at Sevastopol. Moscow was better at instilling fear than winning wars – a distinction Western leaders continue to miss.
Nicholas II (1894–1917) inherited an extraordinary economic boom and promptly squandered it on the Russo-Japanese War, a gamble the empire decisively lost. A decade later, he led Russia into the First World War with the same misplaced confidence. That didn’t end well for Moscow either. Nicholas II is remembered for forcibly Russifying minorities with even more zeal than his predecessors.
Joseph Stalin (1924–1953) is the most instructive example for anyone tempted by today’s talk of accommodating Moscow. In 1939, the Allies hoped to bring Stalin into an anti-Hitler coalition. Instead, he signed a secret pact with Hitler to carve up Eastern Europe – annexing the Baltic states, invading Poland from the east while Nazi Germany pushed from the West.
Moscow’s interests came first. They always do.
When the Allies came to Russia’s rescue after Hitler betrayed Stalin in 1941, the Kremlin took the help and turned on the hand that fed it. Stalin raced his armies to Berlin not to hasten victory, but to plant Soviet flags in other people’s countries. The Iron Curtain and a nuclear arms race were what America received as payback for trusting Moscow. Those who today urge concessions to Putin to peel him from Beijing’s embrace should sit with that history.
Even Boris Yeltsin – toasted at G8 summits and praised for burying the Soviet past – launched a savage war in Chechnya, handed Russia’s riches to loyal oligarchs, and picked his successor from the ranks of the chekists to secure his own immunity. Interests of ordinary Russians and the dreams of freedom be damned. Yeltsin was more Putin than not.
Putin's war? Never heard of it.
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May 13, 2025
To blame Putin for everything is an infallible reflex among the “leaders” of the so-called Russian opposition. Often echoed in Western capitals—by high-profile politicians, top-tier media, and the general public alike—this false paradigm ignores the vast country Putin commands. By omission, millions who live in it are granted a kind of spiritual immunit…
To sustain subjugation at home, Ivans, Peters, and Vladimirs cowed their neighbors and reached for maximum atrocities at every turn. Conquest is the currency of domestic legitimacy. No occupant of the Kremlin throne would waste a windfall – whether from fur, grain, or oil – on the Russian people. That would threaten the extractive system centered on Moscow, which feeds on its internal colonies, now known as the subjects of the Russian Federation.
Putin isn’t a strategic genius playing three-dimensional chess. To wage colonial wars and oppress the peoples of Moscow’s realm is his inheritance, his privilege, and his burden – just as it was for every ruler before him.
No different Russia is waiting to be discovered or unlocked. There is only this Russia – a matryoshka doll of the same violent tragedy under different branding: tsarist empire, USSR, prison of nations, the Russian Federation – persisting in its ways for five centuries. The first step to confronting aggression from the Kremlin is to stop being surprised by it.
A war crimes tribunal for the perpetrators and decades of reckoning for the society that failed to stop them is the only known antidote to the banality of evil. Putin and Russia could use both.
A version of this article first appeared in the Kyiv Independent, on April 15, 2026
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