Putin's best friend growing up in Leningrad was named Sergei Roldugin.

He says that already as a boy Putin dreamed of joining the KGB but was advised to take a law degree first.

When Putin finished it and then received several years of training at the KGB Academy in Moscow, he returned to Leningrad.

Sergei then asked him: "what have you learned, what can you do now?"

Putin replied: "I specialize in hanging out with people, in taking people."

For me, that statement has always meant that Putin was trained to disguise himself, to manipulate his surroundings and dupe people.

He says different things depending on who he is talking to, it all depends on which version benefits him best at the moment.

Of course, this training also includes the right to lie.

Putin has always lied even to foreign heads of state and government, even though he knows they know he is lying.

According to Putin, when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, no Russian troops participated in that conquest.

It was the infamous little green men who carried out the operation, anonymous without any nationality designations.

One month later, Putin awarded military honors to the Russian special forces that had taken Crimea from Ukraine.

"On holiday"

When the war in eastern Ukraine later began the same spring, Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, lied straight in the face when she asked him about the Russian units that, according to NATO satellite images, were fighting on the separatist side in Luhansk and Donetsk.

"No Russian soldiers have been sent there, if there are any there, they are on vacation," Putin said.

Throughout the dramatic run-up to the decision to invade Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has continued to lie.

For a long time he made the outside world believe that there was a diplomatic political solution to the crisis.

World leaders went by shuttle bus to Moscow and sat opposite Putin at the long table in a hall in the Kremlin and were told that he would rather see a peaceful settlement.

Today we know that the purpose of gathering 120,000 soldiers outside Ukraine's borders was not to create peace, but to carry out a war effort that is probably the largest in Europe since World War II.

Putin's lies continued as he argued for his decision to invade Ukraine.

The distorted writing of history that Putin presented in his televised address to the nation was a direct expression of the worldview he acquired during his KGB years.

As a KGB agent, he was stationed in Dresden in the GDR during the second half of the 1980s.

He was never allowed to experience Gorbachev's reforms and glasnost at home.

However, he himself has testified to what betrayal he thought it was that Gorbachev allowed Germany to be reunited and that other satellite states gained their independence.

He could never forgive the Moscow leadership who were not prepared to defend the Soviet empire that emerged after World War II.

Russia as a great power

I do not think Putin is so stupid that he dreams of resurrecting the Soviet Union with the borders that that country had.

He is rational enough not to want a conflict with NATO over, for example, the three Baltic states.

But he wants to give Russia the status of a dominant superpower in Europe, and then he starts with Ukraine.

Putin has never thought that Ukraine is a country of its own.

He has contemptuously spoken of the nation Ukraine as a gift from Russia.

Now he intends to take back that gift.

But it will happen at a terribly high price, especially for the Ukrainian people who are to be prevented from developing their country towards freedom and democracy.