PITY THE POOR INCELS:

The 69-year-old Putin has long been seen as a man so insecure about his fading virility that he has engineered sometimes comical macho displays from ill-considered shots of him riding horseback shirtless through the Russian countryside to hockey games in which his side always wins thanks to a tsunami of goal-scoring by a Gretzky-like Vlad.

In some ways the most poignant of all of Putin's efforts to turn back the clock would be his vain attempts to restore Russia's place in the world to a status akin to that of the Soviet Union in which he was raised and for which he worked as KGB officer from 1975 until 1991, when he resigned following a coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. Putin has called the collapse of the USSR and its empire "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

In a speech in 2005, Putin described that as "a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory." In the years since, he has weaponized his nostalgia into a near calamity for the planet. He has done so by returning the country more toward Soviet-style authoritarianism, crushing opponents in brutal ways of which Stalin might be proud. He has turned Russia into a geopolitical spoiler and maintained a military far beyond what the country could afford.

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