What does Putin do next? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take a deeper look at the future for the Russian leader.

Don’t judge the garden by its harvest but by the seeds that are planted. The saying applies equally to gardening and history. Vladimir Putin has sown a crop in geopolitics that he insists is the only one befitting a Russian ruler of his time – or any earlier one.

Putin is a keen student of historical annals even if he gets others to write his pronouncements. In 2021 he issued a contentious essay on the Russo-Ukrainian past which got him low marks from impartial examiners . The content, though, provides a rationale for the current invasion .

At its hub is an insistence that Russians and Ukrainians are just one people, and his w

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