Photo by Sergei Savostyanov / SPUTNIK / AFP via Getty Images A year ago Vladimir Putin delivered the speech that made it clear he had decided to go to war against Ukraine. In the Russian president’s almost hour-long tirade on 21 February 2022 he claimed that Ukraine had no history of “genuine statehood”, that it had been reduced to a “colony with a puppet regime”, and that it was being transformed into a “springboard” for the West to attack Russia. He accused the government in Kyiv of perpetrating “genocide” against the Russian-speaking citizens of eastern Ukraine and claimed that he...