One way to view the war in the Ukraine is through the lens of time.

Vladimir Putin may no longer be president after 2024. While Putin has previously played all sorts of convoluted shenanigans that allowed him to run things in whichever office he held, this time around it may be for real. Or as real as anything in Putin’s Russia gets. There have been persistent rumors of an underlying medical condition, most recently Parkinson’s, and while Putin is relatively young compared to our leaders, there has been a sense that he is losing focus and control.

This war may be his final effort at nailing down a legacy as one of the great Russian leaders, gambling everything on a roll of the dice that is meant to be seen as restoring a Russian empire. Where in the past he had moved slowly and carefully, this war appears erratic and scattershot, a gamble that seems to have alienated most of his own allies, internal and external, in the face of erratic behavior from Putin. The Russian leader who had always been so careful now strikes his foreign allies as careless and his own government officials as gambling dangerously with their future.

But then Putin may be a leader grasping at a grandiose legacy still far from his grasp while sensing that time is not in his side.

It may also be the case that in the middle of a crucial conflict, America and Russia are being led by two leaders with cognitive issues desperate for a legacy at ay cost