Niall Ferguson, Columnist

Putin’s Ukrainian War Is About Making Vladimir Great Again

Current conditions are ideal for a Russian invasion, but the historical inspiration is more tsarist than Soviet.

January 2, 2022 at 3:00 AM EST

Niall Ferguson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”

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Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

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War is coming — a not-so-great northern war.

Don’t be fooled by last Thursday’s conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Joe Biden, with its promise of further negotiations in January. When one party is bent on war, this kind of diplomatic activity often continues until just hours before hostilities begin. We should not be deluded: Putin is bent on war against Ukraine.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

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