As I watch journalists report from the city my home town of Edinburgh is twinned with – the Ukrainian capital Kyiv – it’s hard to reconcile the place they’re portraying with the one I visited in the second week of October, 1996.

Loitering near me in the dimly-lit airport terminal when I landed were knots of intimidating, preternaturally watchful men in black leather jackets, their heads wreathed in cigarette smoke. I took them for some kind of nicotine-addicted secret police unit. D’oh, they were taxi drivers waiting for a fare. That’s just how people in Ukraine dressed and acted back then.

Later, I visited what was supposed to be Kyiv’s leading department store to find the shelves almost comically bare, and walked streets in the Old Town lined with stalls selling memorabilia stamped CCCP. The food, even in my hotel, was bad to the point of being almost inedible. The whole place seemed so, well, Soviet – or Soviet as I knew it from spy novels and films about the Cold War.

That hotel was the Hotel Dnipro, built in 1964 and still state owned in 1996 as Ukraine emerged from the wreckage of the USSR. It sits overlooking a massive square which has had various names over the decades – Tsar Square, Third International’s Square, Adolf Hitler Square, Stalin Square: you get the drift – but which has now reverted to its mid-19th century name of European Square.

As for why I remember the date so well, it’s because on October 9 I settled down in my room in the Dnipro to watch Scotland play Estonia in a World Cup Qualifier in Tallinn – only the Estonians didn’t show up and the game was abandoned after three seconds. Now regarded as one of the most surreal and bonkers episodes in the history of international football, it seemed oddly appropriate to where I was and how I was feeling about being there.

My point – there is one, bear with me – is that the city I visited and the country I saw a tiny part of have since changed out of all recognition. Today those journalist witnesses speak of a vibrant, modern, young, democratic and Western-looking city, and they’re not wrong.

Which makes it all the more shocking to see it under attack from a Russian army under the ultimate command of Vladimir Putin. Even as you read this, his tanks may be rolling across European Square. How’s that for symbolism? And who’s next after this?

Will Russian tanks enter Tallinn or drive a land corridor through Lithuania to the oblast of Kaliningrad, just 300 miles from Stockholm? Will Spetznas forces parachute into Helsinki under cover of darkness?

Inspired by a biography of Julius Caesar, in particular his decision to cross the Rubicon River to attack a rival and start a war, American author Robert Greene wrote a bestseller called The 48 Laws Of Power.

Laws three and six say “Conceal your intentions” and “Create an air of mystery”, while laws 15 and 17 read “Crush your enemies totally” and “Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability.”

Terror, concealment, unpredictability: any of that sound familiar? The book is much in demand in US prison libraries, apparently, but I’m sure you’ll also find a copy in whichever Kremlin cludgie is reserved for Mr Putin’s cheeks.

The Herald:

Demonstrators showing their support for Ukraine in Edinburgh on February 24

Sure, the Russian leader was funny for a while, albeit in a Kim Jong-un-meets-Gareth from The Office kind of way (which is to say preposterous and sinister).

Whenever he stripped off to be photographed riding bareback or wrestling bears, we laughed (was that his create-an-air-of-mystery phase? Possibly).

When he held his epic, four and a half hour public question and answer sessions we rolled our eyes at his hubris even as we tut-tutted at his disregard of Greene’s twelfth and sixteenth laws (“Always say less than necessary” and “Use absence to increase respect and honour”).

We enjoyed the stories about him requiring anyone who met him to self-isolate for two weeks, such as the director of Moscow’s answer to the Tate Modern which Mr Putin toured in December. We even chuckled earlier this month when he entertained Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, the gaffers of France and Germany respectively, at that massive, five metre long white table.

Within hours of those meetings the meme ninjas and gif wizards had worked their magic and embellished the images with everything from a pair of Russian Olympic Committee ice skaters to Jesus and his Last Supper compadres (though my favourite Photoshopped interlopers were Alice and the Mad Hatter as played by Mia Wasikowska and Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s film).

And then, early on Thursday morning, we went down the rabbit hole, well and truly. Funny became the last word anyone would use to describe Mr Putin. With a flick of whichever finger you use to launch salvoes of short and medium range ballistic missiles, he crossed his own Rubicon.

Maybe he was tired of being sniggered at by the free press. Maybe the bear wrestling and the Q&A sessions have lost their lustre. Maybe, as some commentators suggest, he’s scared Ukraine’s taste for democracy will catch on in Russia and contradict his claim that it’s not something that suits Slavic countries. Maybe he wants to re-build a 21st century version of the old Soviet Union, one which pushes westwards. Maybe he has a yen to test that Three Musketeers motto – “All for one, and one for all” – which is the essence of NATO’s much-vaunted Article 5.

Or maybe he just wants Kyiv department stories emptied of food and its airports filled with men who really are chain-smoking secret policemen, the better to fit the twisted version of Ukraine’s history he presented in that weird and rambling television address. Who really knows anything where Mr Putin is concerned?

A recent cover of The Economist magazine bore an illustration of him as Tony Montana, Al Pacino’s criminal kingpin character in 1983 film Scarface. Echoing one of the movie’s most iconic scenes it shows Mr Putin in a three-piece suit and an open-necked shirt sitting slumped in a throne topped with Russia’s double-headed eagle motif. His elbows are resting on the arms of the throne and there’s an AK-47 complete with grenade launcher across his knees. The cover is pink, a cute colour match for Mr Putin’s puckered lips. His eyes are steely blue: they seem to come right off the page at you.

So this is Mr Putin as gangster, a label often applied to him and for good reason. He rules over a kleptocracy dominated by what’s known in Russian as siloviki, people who have come into politics from the military or, like him, the intelligence services. But the image also nods to Scarface’s blood-drenched closing denouement, when a besieged and beleaguered Tony Montana is blasted into the next world by his drug world rivals.

So it has intimations too of the isolated, out-of-touch dictator, cornered and facing a last stand (see Gadaffi, M., Hussein, S., Ceausescu, N. etc.). Is that where the Russian leader will be headed when the oligarchs and the siloviki begin to feel the sanctions bite, when the casualties mount and the body bags start coming home, when the street protests – there is already a slogan: No To War – reach critical mass? Many in the West hope so.

It may come too late for Ukraine.