FIVE HISTORY LESSONS FOR PUTIN

Dr Mark Galeotti is an honorary professor at University College London's School of Slavonic & East European Studies and has published numerous books on Russian security, foreign policy and state criminality. An expert on the Russosphere, both past and present, his latest book, Putin's Wars, analyses how President Vladimir Putin's military campaigns have reshaped the nation and the world. In light of Russia's globally condemned invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, here he gives his assessment of the lessons that the president ought to have learned from his country's own military history, from Nicholas II to Ivan 'the Terrible'.

V ladimir Putin is well-known for his interest in history. It is one of the few things he apparently reads, and he peppers his speeches with references to past Russian heroes, triumphs and challenges. Indeed, he has paralleled himself variously to such past figures as Tsar Peter the Great, the 18thcentury monarch who battled Sweden, then the great Nordic military power of the age, and Petr Stolypin, the early 20th-century prime minister who combined a commitment to reforming his country with the ruthless suppression of the 1905 Revolution.

That said, Putin is also a strikingly poor historian. He has produced lengthy essays on Russia's relationship with Ukraine, meant to justify his war, that are as stylistically wooden as they are historically dubious, cherry-picking evidence that seems to fit his argument, and stripping them of context and nuance. He has also encouraged a national narrative of struggle and victory focused on war, with World War II - the Great Patriotic War in Russian parlance - as the centrepiece of a heroic tale of military glory. Parade uniforms blend tsarist and Stalin-era aesthetics, school playgrounds feature (deactivated) anti-tank guns of the time, and television channels like the Ministry of Defence's Zvezda (Star) serve up an almost unbroken diet of war films.

In this context, it is all the more striking just how far Putin has also managed to misunderstand or ignore so many of the lessons of Russia's military history, and particularly those learned or understood by five of his predecessors, from the 14th to the 20th century, in his drive to build a great 21stcentury military power.

1 PRINCE DMITRY DONSKOI DON'T BELIEVE YOUR OWN MYTHS