By the beginning of 2020 the only men in Putin’s inner circle were his oldest, most trusted and – tragically for Russia and Ukraine – most hawkish and paranoid allies. The invasion of 2022 was, in the minds of the Soviet-era fantasists who planned and pushed it, first and foremost a pre-emptive strike to save Russia from a looming strategic threat from the West.
Ukraine was merely the battlefield where the two former superpowers’ interests came into direct confrontation – the location for what Putin’s closest circle imagined was a millennial battle between the two sides. “Ukraine does not exist,” Viktor Zolotov, Putin’s former bodyguard who now heads the powerful Russian National Guard, told Alexei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of the Echo Moskvy radio station. “It is the border of America and Russia.”
