I'm Dave Lawler, the author of Axios World.

I started covering international affairs about a decade ago,

and it would have been impossible to cover what was happening around the world

without writing an awful lot about Vladimir Putin.

But it was really two or three years ago that I decided to go deep into who this guy was

and how he had changed the world.

We were coming up on Putin's 20th anniversary in power, and I have always been

fascinated by Putin's Russia, by the fact that this one man was making decisions

that we were feeling all around the world.

One of the first things I learned was that Putin, when he came into power,

was sort of all things to all people.

Everybody saw in this guy what they wanted to see.

And over the last 22 years, he's really gone to places that we never thought he would.

Several months ago, I started to wonder whether Putin might go further than he ever had before.

Not just nibbling at the edges of a neighboring country, but fully invading and going for the

capital. We started getting these warnings from US intelligence that more and more troops were

headed to the border, that these were not ordinary military exercises.

And then about a week before the invasion, Putin started making moves that seemed very ominous.

We've been building to this point for at least eight years,

since Putin first made his move into Ukraine.

But then, all at once, it was a full-scale invasion.

We had this moment where Putin was announcing what he called a special military operation.

...