Additionally, with the West flooding weapons into Ukraine, if Ukraine were to “win” the battle for the Donbas, as many Ukrainians now imagine they could, and indeed if they could push Russian forces entirely out of occupied Ukrainian territory, then what? In this case, my bet about whether Putin goes nuclear flips. To state the central analytic point more clinically: if conditions on the battlefield force Putin to choose between losing and escalating the level of destruction, I’ll give it three-to-one odds that he escalates.

The evidence and analysis that lead to what may seem to some an alarmist conclusion begin with the judgment that if Putin faces defeat in what some Russians are already calling “Putin’s war,” he knows that this will be the end of his twenty-two-year reign—and probably of his life. Moreover, defeat would ensure that the title of the chapter about him in Russian history would be: failure. The vision of a great Russia that he and his colleagues embrace would be consigned to the dustbin.

Second, while many leaders who have made dumb, even evil choices have subsequently had regrets, Putin has repeatedly demonstrated that he has no reservations about committing mass murder in order to achieve his objectives. At the beginning of his regime, he bombed the Russian city of Grozny into rubble, killing thousands of fellow Russian citizens without blinking an eye. To rule a “liberated” Chechnya, he enlisted a local mafioso who had killed thousands of other Russians whom he has labeled “terrorists.” In Syria, Putin enthusiastically joined the butcher of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, in destroying the people of Aleppo.