When Viktor Yanukovych sought to flee Ukraine as he was removed from the presidency in 2014, Vladimir Putin urgently summoned the heads of his military, security, and spy agencies for an all-night meeting on how to extract him. As they broke up at seven in the morning, he recalled, he told them: “We must start working on returning Crimea to Russia.”
In Putin’s telling, he was alone with his top security officials when he made one of the most fateful decisions of his political career.
