Dr Mark Galeotti is an honorary professor at University College London’s School of Slavonic & East European Studies and has published numerous books on Russian security, foreign policy and state criminality. An expert on the Russosphere, both past and present, his latest book, Putin’s Wars, analyses how President Vladimir Putin’s military campaigns have reshaped the nation and the world. In light of Russia’s globally condemned invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, here he gives his assessment of the lessons that the president ought to have learned from his country’s own military history, from Nicholas II to Ivan ‘the Terrible’.
Vladimir Putin is well-known for his interest in history. It is one of the few things he apparently reads, and he peppers his speeches with references to past Russian heroes, triumphs and challenges. Indeed, he has paralleled himself variously to such past figures as Tsar Peter the Great, the 18th-century monarch who battled Sweden, then the great Nordic military power of the age, and Petr Stolypin, the early 20th-century prime minister who combined a commitment to reforming his country with the ruthless suppression of the 1905 Revolution.
That said, Putin is also a strikingly poor historian. He has produced lengthy essays on Russia’s relationship with Ukraine, meant to justify his war, that are as stylistically wooden as they are
