I used to think Putin is Stalin-lite, but he is actually more in line with an incompetent tsar. There is stark resemblance with the Putin’s army and the post-Napoleonic tsarist Russian army. Both bathed themselves in past military glories from defeating Napoleon and Nazi Germany respectively. They paraded themselves with flashy uniforms and spectacles of new technological weaponry. But in the subsequent years and generations after that, tsarist Russia got mauled by the Ottomans, French and British alliance and Japanese. And post-WWII Russia got their assets handed by the Afghans and now Ukrainians.