This is just the prelude (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

A hundred days ago, Putin did what he was always going to do: press the red button on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While US and British Intelligence warned an attack was imminent, much of the world was shocked by the sudden, merciless violence set in motion as Russian military forces entered from the north, east, south, and from across Black Sea.
While the Western media presented this attack as a complete surprise, Putin had been planning it since his 2014 seizure of Crimea. Almost immediately after its annexation, he made clear his belief that he should have done more. He regretted his failure to secure more ports, and openly speculated that he needed land access to the west, beyond Odesa to Transnistria and beyond.
So when he launched his current invasion on February 24, no doubt his mind was fizzing with plans beyond Ukraine. For him, the current offensive was just unfinished business. Once that was executed, he had another agenda.
Over the past three months, I have spent many long evenings rethinking my conversations with Putin, seven years before he became President of the new Republic of Russia. During those meetings in St. Petersburg, he reminisced about his boyhood, camping and hunting in nearby Estonia. I remember thinking that he must have read a KGB briefing on my recent marriage to an Estonian woman. He said that he knew my wife and I had visited the country in 1988, just after I had been a guest of Soviet President Gromyko as part of a UN-sponsored gathering of former heads of governments.
He also knew I had met with officials of the Estonian Republic during the Soviet occupation, and again later with officials of the newly liberated Estonian nation. He expressed strong personal desire to find a way to bring Estonia back to Mother Russia.
Putin talked at length about the historic tragedy of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also added that the Soviet Bloc was the wrong model for what Russia needed. He made an impassioned explanation that what Russia really needed was a new Peter the Great. He talked almost lovingly about Peter’s attempts to upgrade Russia’s institutions and education system from 1682 to 1725. He argued that after the total collapse of the USSR, it had become necessary to rebuild a Greater Russia under the leadership of a new version of Peter.
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