Restoring Russia to its rightful place among the world’s great powers has possessed President Vladimir Putin, whose offensive in Ukraine was to be the culmination of over 20 years of iron-clad leadership.

But Putin, who turns 70 on Friday, has seen his army exhausted by seven months of grueling military action and his country diplomatically isolated.

The Russian leader has even made veiled threats to use nuclear weapons, fueling geopolitical tensions over his election campaign in Ukraine.

It’s a far cry from the turn of the millennium, when a newly minted 47-year-old Putin replaced the ailing Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin, promising friendship and cooperation with the West.

US President George W. Bush hailed him as a “remarkable leader,” while German Gerhard Schröder and Italian Silvio Berlusconi were among his friends even as he cracked down on Russian media and waged war in Chechnya.

But things have changed. Joe Biden – the fifth US President of the Putin era – looked into his soul and saw instead a “killer”, even before the military intervention in Ukraine and the subsequent avalanche of unprecedented sanctions.

On the other hand, his popularity at home seems untouchable, as Russians are grateful for their relative prosperity and Moscow’s return to the top of the world after the economic and political chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

For enemies, however, Putin has moved his homeland further from democracy, orchestrated a takeover of the state by a new elite of former secret police cronies, and stoked nationalism to restore Moscow’s lost empire.

This alleged nepotism is personified by the Rotenberg brothers and Yevgeny Prigozhin, founders of the Wagner paramilitary group, which operates as Russia’s “shadow army” in conflict zones around the world.

A constitutional amendment referendum held at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 allowed him to stay in power until 2036 while the opposition was decimated and leading critic Alexei Navalny was in prison after being poisoned .

For Putin and many of his generation, the demise of the USSR and its sphere of influence remains a painful wound. The resentment for Putin, a former KGB agent in East Germany, was particularly bitter.

The upheaval in post-Soviet Russia unleashed hardships contrary to Western triumphalism. Years later, Putin said he was forced to work as a taxi driver to make ends meet.

In 2005, he described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, and made little attempt to deviate from that claim, repeatedly emphasizing Russia’s “historic mission.”

This narrative generated resentment against the perceived encroachment of NATO and the European Union in Moscow’s backyard.

Convinced that the West was trying to subdue Russia, Putin made Ukraine his red line.

When crowds in Kyiv ousted Russian-backed leader Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, the Kremlin threatened to lose its dominance over a key neighbor.

Within days, Putin ordered special forces to seize the strategic peninsula of Crimea and—after a hasty, internationally rejected referendum—he signed off on the region’s annexation.

The redrawing of Russia’s border unleashed the worst confrontation with the West since the Cold War and unleashed a wave of nationalism at home that skyrocketed Putin’s popularity.

Then, on February 24, 2022, using claims of “genocide” perpetrated by the Ukrainian government against the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine, he sent Russian tanks into its pro-Western neighbors, a first in Europe since World War II.

In 2015, Putin summed up his philosophy as follows: “When fighting is inevitable, strike first.”

“In his eyes…if this war in Ukraine or for Ukraine is lost, the Russian state will soon cease to exist,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of analytics company R.Politik.

The military operation should have been a resounding success – after 22 years at the helm of Putin, Russia’s army has been modernized under an experienced command fresh from Syria.

But plagued by corruption and surprised by the determination of the Ukrainians, Moscow had to give up Kyiv by the spring.

The capture of the east and south proved costly in troops and ammunition.

The fall saw a series of military setbacks. On September 21, Putin announced a mobilization campaign that would recruit hundreds of thousands of reservists.

Battered by Western sanctions, Russia is cut off from international finance and advanced technology.

And his diplomatic isolation was blatantly evident when Putin was not invited to Queen Elizabeth II’s state funeral.

And tens of thousands of Russians, probably hundreds of thousands, are fleeing mobilization and repression.

In the West, some are conjuring up the “drift” of this President, who spent two years largely cut off from the world to protect himself from Covid-19.

Just days before the start of the Ukraine offensive, French President Emmanuel Macron feared a “more inflexible, more isolated” Putin.

He was no longer the one bare-chested on horseback or exploring Lake Baikal in some sort of submarine, but someone sitting meters away from his guests at opposite ends of a huge table.

On television he has come out fiercely against a West in a moral state of decay, rotting to its liberal ideas and the LGBT movement. At the end of September he saw the coming of “Satanism”.

“Macron or (Chancellor Olaf) Scholz have to choose their words, but not Vladimir Vladimirovich. He says what he thinks, does what he wants,” said Russian political scientist Konstantin Kalachev. “He has complete freedom, nothing holds him back.”

With the same conviction he repeats that Ukraine is not a nation, that its independence is a bad turn of history.

Following this logic, on September 30 he announced the annexation of four more Ukrainian regions, even though his army suffered setbacks there.

“Victory will be ours,” he called out to a crowd gathered in Moscow’s Red Square.

Stanovaya, the political analyst, said: “He really believes that he is the one who will reunite the Russian lands. And in my view, it could end badly.”

As Putin himself said, “This is not a bluff.”