The moment of Putin's failure was caught on a phone's camera. It was Friday 25 February 2022. The phone belonged to Volodymyr Zelensky, president of Ukraine. Rumours that he and his government had fled Kyiv were swirling, fanned by Russian propaganda and trolls, but standing in the lamp-lit street outside his presidential office, Zelensky issued a simple message of defiance. “The PM is here, the Party leader is here, the President is here. We are all here”. He continued, “our military is here. Citizens in society are here. We’re all here defending our country, our independence, and it will stay that way”.

In that moment it was evident that Putin had failed to topple Ukraine's government and replace it with one more subservient to Moscow. In the months and years that followed, Russia also failed to win a decisive military victory capable of coercing Kyiv back into the Eurasian sphere. Russia's naked aggression and Ukraine's heroic defence finally spurred an appalled West into action. Ukrainian forces pushed the Russian army back from Kyiv, Mykolaiv and Kharkiv. The war continues but as I write, Ukraine has conducted a successful counter-offensive in Kharkiv, has retaken the one major city Russian forces did manage to take in its initial advance, Kherson, and has fought Russia's much vaunted spring offensive to a bloody standstill in Bakhmut. Russian losses are colossal. The US estimates that Russia has sustained more than 200,000 casualties. It has lost thousands of tanks, APCs and drones, dozens of helicopters and aircraft. Things have got so bad that in September 2022, Putin was forced to order a general mobilization of men of fighting age, pouring badly trained civilians into the grinder to replace the professional troops eliminated by Ukraine's defenders. Wagner recruited prisoners to send to the front and provided the vanguard for the assault on Bakhmut in spring 2023, its cavalier attitude to the welfare of its soldiers resulting in appalling losses. When Ukraine started to turn the tide there too, Prigozhin launched an excoriating public tirade against Putin and the Russian army, who he blamed for the failure – a telling sign that the Putinist alliance is fracturing under the weight of its own war.