The drive to see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through the prism of Putin’s alleged mental-health problems conforms all too neatly to the Western assumption that everyone is emotionally fragile and all major life events are potentially psychologically damaging. Since the war in Ukraine began, there have been countless articles advising people thousands of miles from Kyiv how to protect their mental health in the face of this stressful news cycle. Plus, there are the celebrities – brilliantly skewered by spiked columnist Julie Burchill – who are convinced the war in Ukraine is all about them.

But there is another narrative at play, too. Putin is by no means the first world leader to be written off as mad. In January 2018, over 70 mental-health professionals wrote to Donald Trump’s physician demanding he conduct a cognitive examination of the then president amid ongoing concerns that Trump may have been suffering from dementia. In the UK, Brexit voters were branded not just thick but ‘lizard-brained’, too. Go back even further and we find long-standing attempts to put the blame for the whole of the Second World War on Hitler’s rage at being rejected by the art establishment or his inferiority complex that resulted from paternal beatings. Apparently there is no political problem too complex or global crisis too big it can’t be reduced to the level of individual trauma.

Tempting though it is, we must avoid writing Putin off as simply deranged, deluded and irrational. We need to face the far more complex geopolitical issues that have shaped his recent actions.