Vladimir Putin, the author of the worst war of our century, believes that an ancient priestly chronicle sanctifies the endless bloodshed. The truth about that work of art, The Tale of Bygone Years, helps us to see the truth about Russia’s war. Its hero, the Danish chieftain R?rek, leads us to another work of art, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. We will need the art to get at the tragedy, for the meeting of Putin and Donald Trump in Alaska last week cannot be understood, as we might like to believe, on the basis of comforting concepts such as national interest. 

Putin is a cynical man, the founder of the post-truth politics in which Trump flourishes. But at the bottom of the deepest cynicism can often be found one very naive idea. Putin’s is that Russia has an ancient, unbroken and holy past that includes Ukraine. The Tale, a hodgepodge assembled by medieval Kyiv monks, became for him a kind of prophecy.

In a pre-invasion text of his own and in a long interview with Tucker Carlson last year, Putin presents the life of R?rek as the starting point of a sacred history in which Russia must invade Ukraine. Last week in Alaska, Putin described Ukrainians as “a brotherly nation” with “the same roots” — which must be liberated by violence from their own mistaken belief that they constitute a separate people.