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I do not know if the assertion by the late Litvinenko that Putin is a “€œpaedophile“€ has any basis in truth. Yet there is something going on. If evil can be defined as an absence of good, then it is not a stretch to claim that our Vladimir is on the side of darkness. For too long we expected the best of him; for too long we made excuses; for too long we lay supine while he postured and self-aggrandized. He never wanted to be one of us, while our fraternal overtures he despised as weakness. Crimea he stole and was perfectly willing to take the pain. He believes too that eastern Ukraine will fall to him, Kiev will submit, and the West will weigh the options and cede the point. We shall see.

The times, they are a-changing. Or rather, we have been to this place before. In the year 2000, a thriller of mine”€”Cold Cut, by James H. Jackson”€”was published. It imagined a situation in which the Russian leader engineered a financial and geopolitical crisis in order to bolster his position and return his country to its Stalinist past. How far-fetched it might have seemed. But then, the future can be so hard to predict.