Vladimir Putin has journeyed to the southern city of Volgograd – better known by its former name of Stalingrad – to take part in the 80th anniversary celebrations of the great Soviet victory in the city this weekend. The battle was the turning point of the second world war.

While there, the Russian president specifically linked his invasion of Ukraine with the Nazi attack on Russia – turning history inside out as he did so. ‘It’s unbelievable but true,’ Putin said. ‘We are again being threatened by German tanks. Again and again we are forced to repel the collective aggression of the West.’

Putin is intentionally preparing the Russian people psychologically for a long and merciless war in Ukraine

By painting the West as the aggressor in the Ukraine conflict, although that is the exact opposite of the truth, Putin is deliberately invoking the spirit of the most sacred event in his country’s national consciousness: what Russians  call the Great Patriotic War.

The Russian president knows whereof he speaks. Memories of the titanic and triumphant struggle with Hitler’s Germany are kept alive and constantly refreshed in Russia by a continuous round of anniversaries,  rhetorical references and military parades. By linking these potent events with his own aggression Putin is also identifying with the tyrant who led the country through the second world war: one Joseph Stalin.

Piquantly, Putin has very personal links with the great dictator: his own paternal grandfather, Spiridon Putin, was a chef who cooked meals for both Stalin and Lenin. As a former officer in the KGB, Putin himself is a child schooled in the vicious system that Stalin created.

A new bronze bust of Stalin was unveiled in Volgograd as Putin arrived in the city – the latest stage in an ongoing rehabilitation of the formerly disgraced dictator. The 70th anniversary of his own death in 1953 falls next month.

These days, Russians are encouraged to think of Stalin as the leader who won the Great Patriotic War rather than the murderous monster who had allied with Hitler and killed millions of his own people. He was also responsible for creating an artificial famine in Ukraine, the Holodomor, in which up to 10 million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death.

By channeling his own inner Stalin, Putin is intentionally preparing the Russian people psychologically, not only for his expected Spring offensive in Ukraine, but also for a long and merciless war there – one in which they will be expected to make the same sacrifices in blood and treasure that their grandparents’ generation made at Stalingrad.  For the West, as well as Ukraine, it is a very chilling message.