With Ukraine on the edge of invasion, a question hangs over the West. Who is the real Vladimir Putin? Is he the street fighter who grew up in a dilapidated St Petersburg apartment chasing rats for thrills? Or is he the messianic statesman on a mission to restore Russia to greatness? Is he a cynical opportunist who can be shouted down from the brink? Or a fanatic who sees his personal destiny as enmeshed in that of his country? Put simply: is Putin a thug in a tsar’s clothing or a tsar in thug’s clothing? And which would be more dangerous?

I first unsuccessfully wrestled with this question when I met the widow of the poisoned spy Alexander Litvinenko over dinner back in 2016. As our table of six tucked into beef Wellington, she informed us with unflinching candour that she was perfectly prepared to die at some point in the future due to radiation exposure. This was in the wake of caring for her sick husband, who was assassinated with polonium after he fled to the UK and accused the Kremlin of terrorism and corruption.

After this encounter, I wondered what Putin would make of Marina’s iron Russian stoicism. Would he dismiss her as a faceless victim caught in the crossfire of a gangland hit? Or would he deem her a martyr in his mission to defend mother Russia from the “weak treachery” displayed by her husband? The view of Putin as a Sicilian godfather with a peculiarly Soviet soul seemed endlessly dangerous.

But what is he? The West appears to have gambled big that Putin is, in essence, little more than a mafia man. That for all his grandiose rhetoric about restoring a certain respect for Russia on the world stage, he is focused, above all else, on the survival of his regime. The theory goes that his fragile kleptocracy will not risk sanctions that might antagonise its jet-setting oligarchy or other members of its elite. Nor will Putin want to test the patience of Russia’s disillusioned middle class with a bloody, protracted war.

It seems that Washington’s high-stakes tactic is to apocalyptically talk up the prospect of war in the hope of calling Putin’s bluff. This could be borderline reckless hubris. Or, it could be a cunning bit of theatre that gives the West room for manoeuvre in negotiations: should Putin step back from invading, America and its allies can claim that their solidarity won the day, while at the same time granting limited concessions on their own terms. This might be a de facto commitment to no Nato expansion in Ukraine for the foreseeable, such as a promise not to build bases in the country.

But such a gambit is a throw of the dice – and it could be based on a profound misreading of Putin’s character. One that overlooks his commitment to the idea of Russian “exceptionalism” and historical destiny. One that dismisses his escalating sense of urgency, as the clock ticks down on his presidency.

Putin seems to have internalised a wound that that the Russian psyche has carried since the Cold War. After the Soviet Union imploded, President Gorbachev didn’t so much hope as expect Russia to not merely be absorbed into the free world but actively help to reshape it into the “Greater West”; a pan-continental Europe would stretch from London to Vladivostok. A rules based but ultimately state-centred global order would honour national sovereignty above “universal values”. The West, as the Cold War victors, rejected his delusions but declassified documents suggest that its leaders reassured him there would be no Nato expansion. To the Russian people’s consternation, that promise was broken.

According to this alternative theory of Putin, he, like Gorbachev, suffers from a sense of deep bewilderment that is both partially justified and pompous. As a native of St Petersburg he is said to believe that Russia is part of the West. He is said to deeply resent the EU for arrogating to itself the authority to decide what constitutes Europe. He has apparently been driven to distraction by America’s “illegal” meddling abroad in the name of freedom, from Libya to Iraq.

Above all, he views Ukraine’s drift Westwards as intolerable – it not only leaves Russia excluded from Europe but underscores America’s confidence in an order that can only ever absorb Russia as a junior subsidiary, rather than accommodate it as an equal partner. The risk is that with Europe divided and the US faltering in the wake of China’s rise, Putin thinks he can finally shatter American hegemony by forcing a Nato retreat.

There are clues that Putin may have the gumption to go there. Having grown up in the shadow of the Leningrad siege (which claimed the life of his elder brother), he has attempted to mould Russia into the kind of self-sufficient nation that he thinks the international order should be modelled on. Since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, he has sought to restructure the Russian economy to withstand sanctions, stockpiling huge currency reserves, slashing budgets, and replacing Western imports.

Putin also clearly has a strong sense of Russian history that may border on fanatical. He sees the communist era as a wrong turning and thinks that Russia has essentially been propelled back to the pre-revolutionary period in which he finds himself tsar. He is obsessed with avoiding the fate of Pyotr Stolypin, the failed reforming Prime Minister of Tsar Nicolas II, who was assassinated before the country was plunged into violent revolution.

He has been explicit that he sees his country as sitting on a precipice:“ For the first time in the past 200-300 years… facing a real threat of sliding to the second, and possibly even third, echelon of world states”. In his first presidency, Putin tried internal reform in an attempt to avoid this. Having failed to pull this off, he increasingly frames the problem in terms of Russia’s diminished global status.

This sense of both personal and national mission as Russia stares into the abyss may even be imbued with a certain sort of religiosity. Putin wears an Orthodox cross which his mother gave to him as a baby and has talked conspiratorially about the fact it was the only thing that survived a fire in his family dacha. It is said that, for him, Christian Orthodoxy embodies Russia’s historical Europeanness but on its own terms. Then again, with the black cash and help of Orthodox oligarchs, Putin has cynically used the Russian Church to rival to Western liberal values in Ukraine.

It is a curious combination of fanaticism and nihilism that makes Putin so dangerous. He has the soul of a visionary and the stomach of a thug. The West underestimates him at its peril.