He made this quite clear in an interview with Lionel Barber, then editor of the Financial Times, in 2019. “A towering bronze statue of the visionary tsar looms over his ceremonial desk in the cabinet room,” noted Barber. Peter the Great was Putin’s “favorite leader.” “He will live,” declared the Russian president, “as long as his cause is alive.”

What was Peter’s cause? In essence, to make Russia a European great power, capable of matching the likes of Austria, Britain, Prussia and France in both military might and the economic and bureaucratic foundations on which it is based. No historian would dispute that he achieved that. At the Battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709), Czar Peter won the most important victory of his reign, defeating the army of Charles XII of Sweden, which had been one of the great powers during the seventeenth century. Poltava lies about 200 miles east of Kiev, not far from Luhansk and Donetsk.

This is the history that inspires today’s Czar Vladimir, much more than the dark chapters of Stalin’s reign of terror, which will forever be associated in Ukrainian minds with the Holodomor, the genocidal manmade famine inflicted on Ukraine in the name of agricultural collectivization. It is a history that reminds us how crucial victory in the territory that is now Ukraine was for the rise of Russia as a European great power. It also reminds us that this territory was as contested in the early eighteenth century as it is today.