Dictators never have a Plan B because any admission that Plan A has failed automatically dents their principal claim to authority, which is that they are exceptional, somehow above the common run of mankind.

Napoleon’s intellectual and military brilliance would never have won him the imperial throne of France without his flair for propaganda, which lent him an aura of semi-divinity. Putin’s authority rests on similar bases – if one substitutes low cunning for brilliance and soupy photographs of bare-chested horsemanship and tiger-shooting for Napoleon’s magnificent literary-artistic épopée. Superhumans aren’t supposed to make mistakes.

In 1812 Napoleon doomed himself by his seeming inability to change course when he failed to achieve his primary objective, to get Tsar Alexander I of Russia to honour their alliance. He assembled a huge army and marched it across Europe to intimidate him. As Alexander stood firm and refused to negotiate, Napoleon felt he had no option but to invade Russia. ‘Before two months are out, Alexander will sue for peace,’ he declared, sweeping aside the advice and warnings of his entourage. He assumed that a quick victory would bring Alexander to heel, but the Russian forces retreated while his own lost men, horses and spirit as they advanced into inhospitable territory. The first clashes, even the bloody one at Smolensk, achieved nothing, but instead of pausing and adopting a different plan, he blundered on. The carnage of Borodino, which all but annihilated the Russian army, brought him no advantage, nor did the occupation of Moscow: Alexander would not even consider a face-saving deal. With his strategy in ruins, Napoleon sat in Moscow’s Kremlin as if frozen, wasting precious time before starting a retreat in which his army would literally freeze to death.

Putin has been no wiser. Having, with comparative ease, annexed the Crimea in 2014 and occupied part of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region with a mixture of Russian forces and proxy paramilitaries, he decided to go further. He expected his ‘Special Operation’ to seize Kyiv in a matter of days, welcomed by plaited maidens in folkloric outfits offering bread and salt. It did not work because it was based, like Napoleon’s in 1812, on false assumptions. The first was that he had an effective army, the second that the Ukrainians would cave in.

Poor intelligence is endemic in dictatorships, where messengers bearing unwelcome news are frowned upon if not actually shot. Although Napoleon regularly inspected his troops and their equipment, studied reports and talked to soldiers, he was misled as to their numbers; not wishing to incur his displeasure, his generals dissimulated. ‘From the marshal to the captain, it was as if everyone had come together to hide the truth from him,’ according to one of them, with the result that, in 1812 the Imperial Guard was only half as strong as Napoleon was led to believe. It seems clear that in February 2022 Putin was no better informed, either about the state of his army and its equipment or about the likely resistance he was likely to meet from Ukrainians.

Napoleon knew Alexander to be a weak man but ignored the fact that weak people can prove surprisingly stubborn. Putin thought he was dealing with a lightweight comedian not a national leader. And although it soon became clear that he had met his match in Volodymyr Zelensky, he seems just as helplessly frozen as Napoleon was in 1812, unable to think of anything other than chucking more missiles at Ukraine, waiting, as Napoleon did in Moscow, for his opponent’s, and in this case ‘the West’s’, nerve to break.

By the beginning of 1813, Napoleon faced a formidable coalition of Russia, Prussia, Britain and Sweden, which fielded vast forces against him. Although he demonstrated his military prowess by defeating them in the Battles of Lützen and Bautzen, he could not hope to maintain his grip over Central Europe, let alone the Iberian Peninsula, from which his forces were being squeezed out by Wellington. Yet he did have a chance of maintaining himself on the throne of France and, with time, recovering his ascendancy.

The coalition against him was, like all coalitions, divided by rival ambitions. As Napoleon’s wife was the daughter of the emperor of Austria, it badly needed to bring him onside, and Austria’s chancellor Metternich feared the defeat of France would entail its replacement by overbearing Russian influence, a view shared by other German monarchs. He almost begged Napoleon to give up some of his conquests and make a compromise peace, which would have taken the wind out of the allies’ sails and saved Napoleon his throne.

His generals and most of his political establishment assured him that the people of France wanted only peace and his return to Paris; all the evidence showed that nobody cared a fig any more for the ‘gloire’ he had shrouded himself in and did not want any more victories. But he could not bring himself to believe them. ‘Your sovereigns, born on the throne, can afford to let themselves be beaten 20 times and still return to their capitals; I cannot, because I am a parvenu soldier,’ Napoleon told Metternich. ‘My authority will not survive the day when I will have ceased to be strong, and therefore, to be feared.’ He felt keenly the lack of any legitimacy at the heart of his imperial status, and that he could not survive making what he saw as a humiliating peace. This may be the key to understanding Putin’s state of mind today.

Although he continues to burn bridges and stack up sanctions against his country and criminal charges against himself, there is always a way out. Apart from the handful of people making money out of it, and possibly Kim Jong Un, everyone the world over would like to see an end to the war. With a few sweeteners, Ukraine could be forced to cede some territory, dirty deals could be masked behind creative window-dressing, UN-sponsored plebiscites could be arranged in areas whose population has fled or been deported a long time ago, and so on, in time-honoured tradition.

Putin has staked his reputation on rebuilding a Russian Empire and clearly cannot face his people without achieving it, even though most of them would probably heave a sigh of relief if he were to abandon it, particularly as he could always sell any retreat as a moral victory, as the Russian commander Field-Marshal Kutuzov did in 1812 after disastrously losing the Battle of Borodino. All the evidence is that the overwhelming majority of Russians have no idea what the war is about and don’t much care. They believe what they hear on television, namely that they are under attack from America, the West and sundry ‘Nazis’, and they would as easily believe it if they heard on television that they had been defeated. Modern state-controlled media could turn anything into a triumph. But Putin too is riddled with insecurity. He does not even have the legitimacy he would if he were, perhaps not a king, but at least, like Brezhnev or Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. He’s just a parvenu policeman, and he knows it.