Since February 24, 2022, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has wreaked havoc the world over. The horrors keep piling up. The revelations of torture, executions, rape, and bombing civilian targets are all the harder to understand in that Vladimir Putin, the man responsible for the invasion, has justified it with totally off-the-wall arguments: one day Ukraine doesn’t really exist; the next, Russia needs to prevent it from falling in with the decadent West; yet another, they need to de-Nazify it.

With the perspective that is the privilege of historians, Florence Grandsenne and Pierre Rigoulot break down those arguments, which, between the lines, reveal the Russian leader’s obsessions, which are those of a former KGB officer: seeing foreigners as enemies, believing might makes right and instrumentalizing the millions of victims of the Great Patriotic War – as World War II is called in Russia – to stay in power.

A man of lies, who is swayed by his own absurd and protean propaganda, Vladimir Putin manipulates memory and insults the heroes who died in battle against the – real?– Nazis, while at the same time committing war crimes.