The roots of the current war are much deeper and certainly not limited to Putin's personality. After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, which for Ukraine was absolutely peaceful, the political paths of Ukraine and Russia diverged. The conflict became inevitable after the first Maidan in Kiev in 2004-2005 and the Kremlin's attempts to interfere in the Ukrainian presidential elections. At that time Putin took the defeat of his puppet Yanukovych as a personal insult.

Politically, Ukraine and Russia are two different systems, a fact never taken into account by the Russian authorities, who are accustomed to a centralized power model. When political competition with your neighbor becomes impossible, it is replaced by military competition. War in such conditions seems to be a radical and simple solution. Historically, war was once already chosen as a means of solving the Ukrainian problem. It happened under Vladimir Lenin, in December 1917, when Soviet Russia launched an offensive against the Ukrainian People's Republic. So despite criticism of Lenin's approach to Ukraine, Putin is largely repeating it, trying to correct the "mistakes of the past" with old reliable tools.