The debate about what motivated Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine is freewheeling, but much of it strangely ignores Putin himself. Many, such as University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, blame NATO enlargement. Others say the chaotic American withdrawal from Afghanistan emboldened the Russian strongman. Yale historian Timothy Snyder counters this by arguing the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots influenced Putin’s sense of American weakness far more.

Such theories miss three points. First, ideology matters. As Russian chess grandmaster-turned-democracy activist Garry Kasparov notes in his prescient 2015 book Winter is Coming, Putin’s antipathy toward the West is almost as deep as his irrational hatred of Ukrainian nationalism. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s decision to split away from its Russian counterpart was a shot across the bow for Putin, who sees defending Russian Orthodoxy as one of his primary obligations.