It sounds magnificent. It sounds like Shakespeare. The ageing tyrant, the dread of his own people, the dream of eternity, the unbearable weight of the crown. There is only one problem with it. It is not analysis. It is a libretto.

The West has been listening to this opera for more than 20 years, and every single time it is sincerely astonished that the action on stage bears no resemblance to the programme it paid for.

So let us work out, calmly and soberly, why that keeps happening.

The mistake is in the very first assumption

Applebaum's version rests on an assumption so universally shared that nobody in Washington or Brussels bothers to say it out loud. The assumption is this: Russia is a state, and Putin is the ruler of that state. A bad ruler, an authoritarian one, but a ruler whom that nation somehow produced and somehow tolerates.

And if he is a ruler, then surely he must have an idea. Or perhaps two. In the morning he is seized by the mad notion of restoring the USSR, by lunchtime he has changed his mind and wants the Russian Empire back, and at night the ghost of Stalin's father visits him and the fever passes.

Now simply delete that assumption.

Russia is not a state. Russia is a colony of Moscow. More precisely, it is a colony-corporation that serves a narrow group of Moscow beneficiaries. And a corporation has no dream of eternity, nor can it have one. A corporation has a profit statement and accounts in Swiss banks and other comfortable jurisdictions.

The moment you change the optics, the entire Shakespearean scaffolding collapses, and what stands revealed underneath is accounting. Plain, dull, double-entry accounting. And it explains every decision the Kremlin has taken far better than the collected monographs on Russian autocracy.

The biography of a grifter, not of an ideologue

Let us recall the life story of this Petersburg dreamer of empire.

The 1990s. The city hall of St Petersburg. Food licences. As a result of Colonel Putin's little arrangement, the city saw neither the food nor the money. Then came the Ozero dacha cooperative, a modest association of holiday cottages that somehow, miraculously, turned into the personnel reserve of an entire country.

What happened next you already know. The friends of his youth all became billionaires. On pipelines, on state contracts, on state banks. Every last one of them.

Is that the biography of an ideologue? It is not. It is the biography of a grifter. For 30 years Putin monetised every post he held and every opportunity to rob and strip Russia. Every one, without a single exception.

And now I am invited to believe that in 2014 this man swapped his appetite for money for a lofty idea. Please. Do not make me laugh.

There is a formula that explains Russia better than any library shelf on czarism. Commit it to memory: Russia is a corporation in which all the costs are nationalised and all the income is privatised.

The pipeline supposedly belongs to the state, but the profit from the pipeline goes to Putin's friends. Rosneft's losses are covered by the budget, while the dividends are collected by the families of the Ozero residents. The war is paid for by 140 million people, while the billions of dollars in margin skimmed off defence orders are taken, once again, by a few dozen surnames registered in that same cooperative.

And note one detail that nobody in the West seems to notice. Through all the years of this war, not one of the Ozero beneficiaries has fled Russia. The IT specialists fled. The journalists fled. The scientists fled. The chekists stayed. Why? Because for them the war is not a catastrophe. For them the war is an extremely profitable business project, and no sane man walks away from a project in its most lucrative phase.

The Maidan did not topple autocracy, it destroyed a business model

Applebaum tells us that in 2014 Putin took fright at Ukrainian democracy. That he was terrified by an example of freedom which might infect Russia.

Nonsense.

Putin was enraged that a crypto-colony had walked out on him. Yanukovych was a franchisee of the Moscow corporation, and he operated strictly according to the franchise agreement: discounts on gas in exchange for Ukrainian assets, ruinous Kremlin loans in exchange for turning away from Europe. Yanukovych was selling Ukraine to Russia in exactly the same way that Russia sells itself to the United States. The only difference is the size of the commission.

So the Maidan did not topple autocracy. The Maidan destroyed a scheme. In a single winter the corporation lost a market of 40 million consumers, lost its transit corridor and, worst of all, lost Odesa.

Marx observed long ago that without Petersburg and Odesa, Russia is a giant with its arms cut off. A century and a half later nothing whatsoever has changed. Russia pumps its resources out through Odesa and through Piter, because it has no other full-scale exits to the world. With Ukraine gone, the colossus of the comprador system became, quite literally, a one-armed bandit.

That was the real blow. Not the example of freedom, not the contagion of democracy, not the fear of the square. For a grifter, losing the market where he sells the stolen goods is more frightening than any ideology and any democracy.

People as the new oil: a population that pays for its own camp

And now the main thing, the thing about which Western analysts are most stubbornly silent.

In the system in which Russia exists today there are no citizens. There are not even subjects. There is an aboriginal colonial population, and for Moscow that population is a resource, differing in no essential way from crude oil or iron ore. Russian officials have been joking for years that people are the new oil. Well, it has stopped being a joke. It is now a description of an extraction technology.

Watch how the field is pumped. A man pays his taxes. The taxes fill the budget. Out of the budget you pay the policeman who keeps that same man obedient. And out of the same budget you pay the contractors who build, guard and service everything else. The margin flows upwards, the costs are pushed downwards.

Which means that Russians genuinely finance their own upkeep inside the camp.

And even that is not the ceiling. When the corporation needs manpower to seize new assets, Russians hand over their own bodies in exchange for coffin money, which is paid out, once again, from their own taxes. The circle closes completely. They pay for the guard, they pay for the barbed wire, they pay for the war in which their children die, and they receive the compensation for those children out of their own pockets.

In substance, the population of the Russian camp finances its own slavery voluntarily and of its own free will. This is the perfect colonial model, one the old empires could only have dreamed of. They at least had to ship their overseers out to the colony at their own expense and maintain them from the metropolis. Moscow has achieved something greater. The colony maintains the overseers itself, and then thanks them on television for their selfless labour.

Now tell me honestly: what would a machine like that want with a fairy tale about a place in history?

Ukraine is not a historic land, it is a lost asset

The aggression is in fact very easy to explain, and you need neither Shakespeare nor Ivan Ilyin to do it.

Russia has to expand, because the old deposits are running dry. The oil burns under strikes on the refineries. The demography sags. And the appetites of the shareholders of the corporation called Russia only grow, because not one of them intends to trim his personal consumption for the sake of a historic mission.

Within that logic, Ukraine is no historic land at all. Ukraine is a lost asset which Moscow still regards as its own and intends to put back on the balance sheet. Black earth, ports, metal, nuclear generation, and 40 million units of new oil that can be placed under the tax pump.

Everything else is packaging.

Why there can be no transition of power

Now to the question of why Putin will fight to the end. To his own end.

Applebaum calls it a personal war for power, and on that point she is entirely right. What she does not understand is why it works that way.

Putin, like Stalin before him, built a system in which he cannot be overthrown. Which means he also cannot be replaced. A transition of power inside such a construction is physically impossible. The elites are bound together by blood and by money. The security towers watch one another and wage their own quiet wars. Any conspiracy becomes visible before it has finished being born. There is no successor in this system and there cannot be one, because any successor is a direct threat to the regime in place and to the men standing by the pipe today.

Stalin died in office. Putin will die the same way. He will sit on the throne to the very end, not because the people love him, but because there is exactly one door out of that system, and everybody knows it, himself included.

While he lives, he will not leave. And when he dies, the shareholders are unlikely to gather peaceably and appoint a new czar. The system barely survived Stalin. Will it survive Putin? The Cap of Monomakh is very heavy, and it promises its wearer far too much profit.

One grifter recognises another

And finally, a word about the one man who harbours no illusions at all.

Strange as it sounds, that man is old Trump. Trump entertains no romantic theories about an empire of the spirit or about Putin as a tragic hero. He sees straight through him and understands perfectly well what is sitting across the table: a comprador, a grifter with a nuclear button. Trump reads every move Putin makes through money, through the deal, through interest.

And you know what? That is precisely why he understands Putin better than anyone. Better than all the European intellectuals put together.

There is simply no point in discussing values with Putin. He has none. What he has is cold arithmetic and a cynically quoted price. And while the West goes looking for a soul in the grifter, the grifter goes looking for margin in the West. He finds it, too.

The orcas that explain everything

And now a scene that confirms everything written above better than any argument could.

The end of August. Moscow Pedagogical University. In front of Putin sits a young teacher of Chinese who has just come back from the North Pole and is describing what he saw with genuine delight. Putin perks up and asks whether the teacher saw any polar bears. The teacher says he did. Two of them, huge, magnificent animals.

And at that point Putin begins to rave.

Orcas live right nearby, he explains. They eat those bears like small fry. They come at them in a pod and tear them to pieces. Such, you see, is the food chain. And children, Putin adds, should be told about this too, so that they understand what sort of world we live in and why the special military operation is being conducted.

So Russia attacked Ukraine because orcas eat polar bears.

Let us set aside the small matter that orcas do not eat polar bears and that not one single case of such a hunt has ever been recorded. That is not the point. The point is the speed. Putin invented that piece of nonsense right there on the stage and delivered it within 3 seconds with the air of a seasoned Arctic hand. And the entire hall nodded along in unison, so that heaven forbid Putin should suspect that anyone had failed to believe him.

It is a perfect demonstration of how the Putin nonsense generator is built. The Polovtsians, the Pechenegs, the thousand years of history, historical justice, denazification and the orcas all lie together in one drawer, and they fly out of it at random in the most unexpected moments. Putin sprays words and ideologemes for one very simple reason. He has to feed the hamsters, as the Russian internet calls his credulous audience, and he feeds them constructions of meaning designed to carry the viewer as far as possible from the actual picture of what is happening.

Applebaum, meanwhile, sees a Macbeth in this man. An ageing tyrant bent under the weight of history, gripped by an animal terror of freedom. And he, at that very moment, is laughing at her and at everyone else while telling stories about orcas devouring polar bears by the pack, and he does not consider it necessary even to pretend that he thought about it for longer than a second.

So never go looking for meaning in Putin's words. There never was any and there never will be. Putin is sincerely occupied with one thing only: sucking out of Russia, through the pipe, everything that can be sold to the West or to China.

All the rest is orcas.