Vladimir Putin didn’t so much allow his mask to slip on Thursday, as cast it aside with a flourish the likes of which Peter the Great would have been proud.
By comparing himself to the tsar who founded St Petersburg and introduced reforms that eventually transformed Russia into a major European power, Putin in one stroke removed any possible succour for those claiming his murderous war is about “legitimate security concerns” or “de-Nazification”.
Only the most loyal Kremlin apologist will now be able to continue with the pretence that the assault on Ukraine is anything other than a land grab.
“Peter the Great waged the Northern War for 21 years. You might think ‘he was fighting with Sweden, seizing their lands…’ He wasn’t capturing them. He was reclaiming them,” Putin told an audience of young entrepreneurs and scientists in Moscow.
“When Peter the Great laid the foundation of a new capital in St Petersburg, none of the European countries recognised this territory as Russian. Everyone recognised it as Swedish,” he said.
“But along with Finno-Ugric peoples, Slavs lived there from ancient times. Why did he invade it? To reclaim [our lands] and strengthen [the state]. That’s what he did. It seems that it’s our turn now to return [the land] and strengthen [the state].”
Many in Eastern Europe, particularly the Baltic and Nordic states, have been clear-eyed for years about the threat posed by Putin’s warped world vision.
According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a think tank monitoring international aid, Estonia has donated 220 million euros to Ukraine since Feb 24, the largest donor per capita. Lithuania and Poland are not far behind. Sweden and Finland have applied to join Nato.
Aid is not a competition, of course, but actions speak louder than words, particularly when it comes to deliveries of promised weapons, as Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor is being forced to recognise.
Mr Scholz and Emmanuel Macron, the French president, have been vilified for continuing to talk to Putin, even as atrocities in Bucha and Irpin have come to light.
They claim there should always be room for diplomacy, that jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
If they ever had a point, after Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and swarms of “little green men” in Ukraine’s eastern regions, that point has surely been reached now Putin has shown his true colours in such vainglorious style.