“Putin’s response to this economic stagnation and the political peril it represented was to shift the basis of his regime’s legitimacy from economic progress, which made Putin so popular in his first two terms in office, to Putin as the defender of a motherland besieged by the West,” Aron told me. “Putin concluded that if he was going to be a president for life, he had to be a wartime president for life.”Writing in The Hill, Aron quoted Russian opposition columnist Sergei Medvedev as recently observing: “Putin has forged a nation of war that has battened the hatches and looks at the world through a lookout slit of a tank. … The degree of military-patriotic hysteria [in] Russia today brings to mind the U.S.S.R. of the 1930s, the era of athletes’ parades, tank mock-ups and dirigibles.”This is classic wag-the-dog politics. Putin is a thug, but he’s a thug with an authentic Russian cultural soul that resonates with his people. His obsession with the Soviet Union and his nostalgia for the power, glory and dignity it gave him and his generation of Russians run deep. He was not exaggerating when he declared in 2005 that the breakup of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century.And because Ukraine, and its capital, Kyiv, played a central role long ago in Russian history, and because Ukraine was a bulwark and breadbasket of the Soviet Union in its heyday, and because perhaps eight million ethnic Russians still live in Ukraine (out of 43 million), Putin claims that it is his “duty” to reunite Russia and Ukraine. He blithely ignores the fact that Ukraine has its own language, history and post-Soviet generation that believes its duty is to be independent.For Putin, losing Ukraine “is like an amputation,” remarked political scientist Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. “Putin looks at Ukraine and Belarus as part of Russia’s civilizational and cultural space. He thinks the Ukrainian state is totally artificial and that Ukrainian nationalism is not authentic.”The reason Putin has accelerated his Ukraine threat — which I would call “marry me or I will kill you” — is that he knows that under Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, the process of Ukrainization has accelerated and the Russian language is being pushed out of schools and Russian television out of the media space.Said Krastev: “Putin knows that in 10 years the young generation in Ukraine will not be speaking Russian at all, and it will have no identification with Russian culture.” Maybe best to act now, thinks Putin, before the Ukrainian Army gets bigger, better trained and better armed — and while Europe and America are in disarray over Covid and in no mood for war.