One Year On, Putin Must Wish He'd Read His Herodotus
What the war in Ukraine has proven is that all of us, starting with the Russian president, have been arrogantly wrong about almost everything.
No intellectual humility in this space.
Photographer: Alexey Nikolsky/AFP via Getty Images
A big lesson all of us — but especially people in power — should learn from Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine one year ago has to do with intellectual humility, and the disastrous consequences of its absence. That’s because not only the Russian president but almost everybody has been wrong, wrong, wrong about almost everything.
Putin was most obviously wrong in his perception of Ukraine as a country. Wallowing in the quack historiography of charlatans, he had convinced himself that Ukraine isn’t a nation in its own right, but a mere appendage of Greater Russia. Over the past year, Ukrainians proved the opposite: that they’re fiercely independent, with an identity defined largely against the Kremlin’s imperialism.