“He’s lost his fucking mind.” It’s Monday night, and I’m speaking to my friend, the American-Ukrainian author Vladislav Davidzon. We have both just watched Vladimir Putin’s televised speech from the Kremlin, and he — like Putin — is no longer mincing words. He lives in Ukraine; he can no longer afford to…

This was the performance of a man who has been the Tsar of Russia for two decades. A man surrounded only by flatterers and “yes men”, who now seems to use even his inner circle as little more than a rubber stamp for his delusions. But it was also the performance of a man who had weathered the pandemic locked away from other humans, with his head buried in dodgy Soviet books on Ukraine history…

My friend, Dmitri, is less sanguine. “I was sceptical about talk of an invasion,” he told me. “But after hearing about the annexation in Donbas, I started to panic. I read Putin’s tweets. He is a high functioning psychopath. Any scenario now is bad, isn’t it? We might be trapped.” And yet it’s not just my many Ukrainian friends I now fear for. I also fear for my Russian ones. Russia is going to become an even darker and more repressive place. And they will pay, as surely as Ukrainians will, for Putin’s creeping madness.