Vladimir Putin’s grand dream of the Greater Russia is turning to ash. More than four years have passed since he gambled on a lightning strike on Kyiv. He believed overpowering force would carry the day and that the people of Ukraine would welcome reunification with “Mother Russia”. Instead, the war went wrong from day one. And now it is going increasingly badly. The Russian military is paying a staggering price. Casualty rates are running between 30,000 and 50,000 a month. The Russian government is so desperate for recruits that they have emptied the prisons and are now offering a signing bonus of $80,000 with a further $140,000 in debt relief. For the average Russian, these are unheard-of sums. And yet, people understand what the money represents: a death sentence. Increasingly, they are doing whatever they can to avoid the military dragnet. The Ukrainian drone campaign is so deadly that the life expectancy of a Russian recruit on the front lines has been reduced to a mere 20 to 35 minutes. Such a kill rate makes previous “meat grinder” battles like the Somme, Verdun, and Stalingrad seem almost tame by comparison. It is estimated that over a million young people have fled Russia. They represent the future of the country, and they have no intention of dying for Putin’s attempt to impose “Greater Russia.” This war is not sustainable, and there is growing speculation over how long Putin can hang on. Putin, Trump and Netanyahu ushered in the age of monsters with an audacious disregard for the rule of law and a willingness to use the most vicious means to exercise power. But it is all going wrong. The three tyrants have wrought catastrophe on the world and on their people. But do not count them out yet. They are dangerous. Even more so when cornered. Especially Putin. The Rise of the Monster To understand how we got here, it is necessary to consider how Putin came to power. His rise was influenced by the choices made by the West after the fall of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the 1990s, there was enormous relief because of the end of the Cold War. There was hope for the “peace dividend,” in which funds spent on the arms race could be diverted to improve citizens’ lives. There were those who understood that Russia’s transition to a stable democracy and a robust market economy would require significant investment and cooperation. Some advocated a modern Marshall Plan as was used to rebuild Germany and Japan in 1946. Such investments would also provide leverage to demilitarize the immense Soviet nuclear strike force. But Western leaders were in the throes of deregulation and neo-liberal mania. They opted for “shock doctrine,” believing that if they pulled out all state subsidies and planning, they could transform Russia into a capitalistic free market overnight. The result was a catastrophe for average Russians. In a mere four years, the average life expectancy of Russians dropped by six years. As gangsters and the rising oligarchs were looting the Russian economy, the American government pressured President Boris Yeltsin to demilitarize. But he was struggling with the enormous impacts of shock-doctrine politics. Goodwill from the West would have gone a long way to shore up a democratic ally. Erasing the Russian debt was one obvious option. The United States held only $2.8 billion in debt from the Soviet era. If the USA abolished the debt, they could have pushed the allies to alleviate the outstanding $65 billion debt. This would have given Yeltsin breathing room. But the Bush administration insisted that the Russians not only pay the debt that the Soviet system owed but also the debt that had been reneged on from the Tsarist era. The repayment was contingent on receiving badly needed grain shipments. Triumphal Western leaders didn’t pay much attention to how this was perceived in Russia. NATO, which had been established to contain the Soviet threat, began expanding further and further east even though there was no perceived enemy. Western triumphalism was everywhere. The former states of the Soviet Union were breaking apart — some peacefully, others in violent conflict. One person who recognized the danger of the moment was disgraced former president Richard Nixon. In a 1992 memo, he warned against making the same mistake the Allies made against Germany at Versailles in 1919. He feared that without goodwill and investments from the West, the nascent Russian democracy would crumble. Ian Shapiro, in the book After the Fall, writes that Nixon didn’t fear a return to communism but the rise of an “aggressive Russian nationalist who would threaten the emerging post-Cold War peace and the possibilities of peace that came with it.” Nixon saw the future. The aggressive Russian nationalist arrived in the form of Vladimir Putin. Nobody in the West paid much attention to how he actually came to power and we have been living with the fallout ever since. The Apartment Bombings On September 4, 1999, a car bomb exploded outside an apartment in the isolated city of Buynaksk near the Chechen border. The bomb completely destroyed the building, killing 64 and injuring 133. Five days later, an apartment building at 19 Guryanova Street in Moscow was hit by a massive bomb. The nine-story apartment building was torn apart, killing 106 people and seriously injuring 250 more. Russia’s security service blamed Chechen terrorists. The strange thing, though, was that no Chechen unit claimed responsibility. Chechnya had signed a peace deal after the brutal Chechen war for independence. Russian troops had departed. Why would they force a new conflict now? Four days later, another building was hit in Moscow. This one wiped out an 8-story building. It was total carnage with 119 dead and more than 200 seriously wounded. Each of these bombings had the impact of the notorious Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. People were terrified. It was at this point that Vladimir Putin stepped into the limelight. He was the former director of the FSB (the replacement for the KGB) who Boris Yeltsin had appointed as Prime Minister in August 1999. Some suggested his appointment as Prime Minister was payback for helping Yeltsin out of trouble with pesky prosecutors investigating corruption. Up until this moment, Putin was a shadowy figure. Not anymore. He boldly vowed to take the war to the Chechens. He promised to hunt down the killers and enact revenge. To a terrorized population, the shadow man seemed like a saviour. On September 16, a truck bomb exploded outside an apartment in Volgodonsk, killing 17 and injuring 69. Putin signed a decree for emergency powers to defend the people. He vowed to take the fight into Chechnya. But then on September 22, 1999, a fifth bomb was located in the city of Ryazan. A witness saw men bringing massive bags of explosives and a detonator into the basement of an apartment building. Police were called. The men were captured. But they weren’t Chechen terrorists; they were FSB agents — men working for the agency of Vladimir Putin. The police who came to the scene believed these bombs posed a deadly serious threat. The FSB, however, arrived to take control. They claimed the explosives were just bags of sugar and were being used as part of a training exercise. None of it added up. The story was quickly covered up and then forgotten as Putin launched a massive assault on Chechnya, violating the peace terms from the first Chechen war. Putin presented himself as the defender of Russia and moved quickly to take control of the Russian Federation. On New Year’s Eve 1999, Putin appeared on television and presented himself as the new leader of Russia. Some think that the new century began on 9/11, but it really began when Vladimir Putin took control of the once-mighty Russian empire. Those in Russia who tried looking into the apartment bombings or Putin’s increasingly autocratic rule ended up in prison or dead. Alexander Litvinenko and journalist Anna Politovskaya raised questions about who planted the bombs, and both were murdered. Other journalists were threatened and forced to flee. To western leaders, Putin represented stability. Money from the oligarchs continued to flow into London, New York and other western centres. Few lost sleep over Putin’s attack on Russian democracy. Clinton and Tony Blair embraced Putin as a man they could work with. George W. Bush Jr. reassured Americans that he had looked into Putin’s eyes and could see right into his soul. Reassured, Bush said Vladimir was a good guy. But the question of who planted the bombs remained a dark and unresolved issue. Was it the work of Putin and the FSB? If Putin was willing to terrorize his own people to take power, what extreme violence would he be willing to use to maintain power now that he is threatened? He has stated multiple times his willingness to use the deadly hypersonic missiles against Europe or nuclear weapons if his “red lines” are crossed. There is a kind of dark irony in the fact that it was Richard Nixon who saw the future, warning that a new age of monsters was ready to rise from the hubris of Western triumphalism. 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