Rice said, “Vladimir Putin expected an easy win here. He thought he would waltz into the capital, into Kyiv, in his own delusional rendering of history, Ukrainians and Russians are the same, and he would overthrow this government and might even be welcomed as a liberator. And of course, the reality has been something quite different.”

She continued, “I met with him many times, and this is a different Putin. He was always this KGB man. He once said you’re always essentially KGB man if you are, so he had that tough veneer. He was always calculating and cold, but this is different. He seems erratic. There is an ever-deepening, delusional rendering of history. It was always a kind of victimology of what had happened to them, but now it goes back to blaming Lenin for the foundation of Kyiv in Ukraine. So he’s descending into something that I personally haven’t seen before.”