Predicting anything in this hellish week is a fool’s endeavour but of one thing I am sure: Putin has destroyed the appeal of strongman politics in the 2020s as effectively as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin did in the 1930s.

The career of Volodymyr Zelenskiy explains why. He has not played the Putinist game of divide and rule or created a personality cult. At his inauguration, he asked government workers to end the Soviet practice of putting pictures of the ruler on their office wall. “Hang your kids’ photos instead and look at them each time you are making a decision,” he said.

Just before Putin’s forces attacked, Zelenskiy appealed to Russians in their own language to reject Putin and emphasised his determination to protect Russian minorities in Ukraine. The broad appeal of his leadership helped create the broad resistance to invasion.