All of which is a roundabout way of explaining the extraordinary significance, to Putin, of Ukraine. Of course Ukraine matters as a symbol of the lost Soviet empire. Ukraine was the second-most-populous and second-richest Soviet republic, and the one with the deepest cultural links to Russia. But modern, post-Soviet Ukraine also matters because it has tried—struggled, really—to join the world of prosperous Western democracies. Ukraine has staged not one but two prodemocracy, anti-oligarchy, anti-corruption revolutions in the past two decades. The most recent, in 2014, was particularly terrifying for the Kremlin. Young Ukrainians were chanting anti-corruption slogans, just like the Russian opposition does, and waving European Union flags. These protesters were inspired by the same ideals that Putin hates at home and seeks to overturn abroad. After Ukraine’s profoundly corrupt, pro-Russian president fled the country in February 2014, Ukrainian television began showing pictures of his palace, complete with gold taps, fountains, and statues in the yard—exactly the kind of palace Putin inhabits in Russia. Indeed, we know he inhabits such a palace because one of the videos produced by Navalny has already shown us pictures of it, along with its private ice-hockey rink and its hookah bar.

Putin’s subsequent invasion of Crimea punished Ukrainians for trying to escape from the kleptocratic system that he wanted them to live in—and it showed Putin’s own subjects that they too would pay a high cost for democratic revolution. The invasion also violated both written and unwritten rules and treaties in Europe, demonstrating Putin’s scorn for the Western status quo. Following that “success,” Putin launched a much broader attack: a series of attempted coups d’état in Odessa, Kharkiv, and several other cities with a Russian-speaking majority. This time, the strategy failed, not least because Putin profoundly misunderstood Ukraine, imagining that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would share his Soviet imperial nostalgia. They did not. Only in Donetsk, a city in eastern Ukraine where Putin was able to move in troops and heavy equipment from across the border, did a local coup succeed. But even there he did not create an attractive “alternative” Ukraine. Instead, the Donbas—the coal-mining region that surrounds Donetsk—remains a zone of chaos and lawlessness.