Madeleine Albright took up pen again in February.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, published the day before Russia invaded Ukraine, she described her first encounter with Vladimir Putin.

That was in early 2000. The Secretary of State was the first senior US official to meet the new man in the Kremlin.

As she wrote, not much was known about him in Washington – basically only that he had once been a KGB officer.

Majid Sattar

Political correspondent for North America based in Washington.

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Even then, she noted that Putin was ashamed of the collapse of the Soviet Union and was willing to make Russia strong again.

But he did tell her at the time that Russia's place was in the West.

In the post, she warned Putin against a historic mistake: an invasion would isolate Russia diplomatically, cripple it economically and wound it strategically in the face of a united, strong West.

She also correctly predicted the resistance of the Ukrainians.

Her tenure was marked by the Kosovo War

Bill Clinton had appointed Albright head of the State Department in his second term.

After four years as UN Ambassador to New York, she succeeded Warren Christopher in 1997 and became the first woman Secretary of State of the United States.

Your term of office was marked by the Kosovo war, the conflict with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and the (unsuccessful) search for a peace solution between Israel and the Palestinians.

She made sure no one underestimated her.

She is said to have snapped at Colin Powell, then chairman of the Pentagon's joint chiefs of staff, about what you have this top-notch military for if you can't use it.

The diplomat could fence with the foil.

But she was no stranger to more robust disciplines.

Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague in 1937.

She was the daughter of a diplomat who converted with his wife from Judaism to Catholicism in 1941.

The parents didn't tell the children about it.

Albright only found out about her Jewish roots through research after she became secretary of state.

The family had left Czechoslovakia for England in 1939 – a few days after the Nazis invaded.

The family initially returned after the war, but eventually settled in the United States when the communists took power.

Albright - in 1959 she had married the publisher Joseph Albright, with whom she had three children - studied international relations in Washington and received her doctorate from Columbia University in New York with a doctorate on the Prague Spring.

There she met Zbigniew Brzezinski, later Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, who later brought her into the White House.

She remained connected to the academic world: During the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, she taught at Georgetown University.

After leaving office as Foreign Minister, she founded a consulting firm.

Although Vaclav Havel had brought her up for discussion as his successor in the presidency in Prague, Albright refused to return to her native country.

In 2016 she campaigned for Hillary Clinton.

With some young Democrats struggling with Clinton, whose feminist message was discredited and preferred to support Bernie Sanders in the primary, Albright ranted in her own way: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women .” On Wednesday she died at the age of 84 after a long illness.