Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images When Vladimir Putin launched his murderous assault on Ukraine in the early hours of 24 February 2022, he conjured a parallel reality in an address on Russian television. In this fictional version of the war, he was waging a valiant crusade to save innocent Russian-speaking civilians in Ukraine from the “genocide” being perpetrated by the “extreme nationalists and neo-Nazis” who controlled its government. His “special military operation” was not an imperialist land grab, but a laudable effort to bring about the “demilitarisation and denazification” of Ukraine. There was a glaring hole in Putin’s argument: Volodymyr...