During the 2012 US presidential campaign, Republican challenger Mitt Romney referred to Russia as America’s most significant geopolitical foe and Barack Obama pounced on it as a gaffe. “My opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy,” he quipped at the Democratic national convention, with an ironic pause before the word “new”. “You don’t call Russia our number one enemy – not al-Qaida, Russia – unless you’re still stuck in a cold war mind warp.”

He spoke with that trademark clipped delivery that manages to make every statement sound both funny and reasonable, and his listeners loved it, howling with laughter at the risible Republicans’ exaggerated estimation of Vladimir Putin’s potency. Even Obama wouldn’t dare to make that joke now.

Last week, we had to contemplate seriously the startling possibility not only that Putin possesses a video of Donald Trump looking on while Russian prostitutes urinate on a bed in a high-end hotel room, but also that the president-elect co-ordinated his entire campaign with the Kremlin leader. Trump, of course, slammed the dossier detailing his alleged ties to Putin as “fake news – a total political witch-hunt”, but no one in Washington now is dismissing Russia, as Obama did two years ago, as a regional power. Russia is back and it is all down to Putin.

Putin’s spokesman has denied any role in subverting the US election, in hacking the servers of the Democratic party or any interest in blackmailing Trump: “The Kremlin does not engage in collecting compromising material.” But anyone who has followed Putin’s career knows that is simply not true. Putin has regularly used any tricks, no matter how dirty, to achieve his aims. After all, one of the Russian president’s first public appearances was, as head of the FSB, to confirm that a man shown on television romping with two prostitutes was a prosecutor then attempting to investigate high-level corruption. His intervention ended the prosecutor’s career and the corruption probe.

If Russia’s security services have filmed Trump engaging in that kind of behaviour, it would allow them to blackmail the leader of the free world. That would mean Putin had scored an intelligence coup more complete than anything any Soviet leader achieved. Even the fact we are discussing this shows he has restored Russia as a country to be reckoned with.

Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952 and came of age in the glory years of Soviet communism. He was just nine years old when a Vostok rocket lifted Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the Earth. At the time, Moscow controlled everything from Afghanistan to the Arctic Ocean, from the banks of the Elbe to the Sea of Japan. It was a mighty land empire the likes of which the modern world had never seen. It intervened in force whenever its interests were threatened and its fearsome security services kept an eye on perceived enemies at home and abroad.

There were free thinkers in the Soviet Union, of course, and a lively underground scene worked away on topics the authorities deemed off-limits, but Putin was not part of it.

A conformist, he joined the KGB in the mid-1970s and worked his way up until he was posted abroad in 1985. He served in Dresden, East Germany, and it was from this unpromising vantage point that he witnessed the turbulent death of communism. He took no part in the birth of democracy at home, in the street debates and the first stirrings of free trade. He was tasked to defend communism as an agent of the KGB but had to stand by and watch as Germans celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall. Over the next two years, Moscow lost control of 21 countries. The collapse of Soviet power wasn’t just a defeat and a tragedy, but a personal humiliation.

He returned to Leningrad, now St Petersburg again, and served in the city administration until being called to Moscow, where his career progression was rapid. Promoted to head the FSB, he impressed then-president Boris Yeltsin with his diligence and, in 1999, became prime minister. He was the fifth premier in just 16 months but, if anyone was expecting his stay in the top job to be as short as his predecessors’, he surprised them.

Within five months, Yeltsin had stepped aside to make Putin acting president and he has dominated Russia ever since, his first priority being to restore the prestige that his homeland enjoyed in his youth. He relentlessly strengthened his grip on Russia, crushing first the Chechens, then the media, then the oligarchs, then opposition parties, to create what insiders have called “manual control”.

He has never taken criticism well (he once suggested a French journalist’s penis should be cut off, following a hostile question at a press conference) and western leaders’ habit of referring to the human rights abuses committed by his security forces has repeatedly poisoned relations, as did US encouragement for uprisings in the ex-Soviet states that he considers to be his sphere of influence.

That came to a head in 2011, when thousands of young Muscovites protested in the depths of winter against vote rigging, something he blamed on the then US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

That gave Putin’s intervention in the US presidential election a personal tinge, especially when Trump cast the Russian leader as an admirable alternative to Clinton, whom he said was guilty of corruption, mismanaging the economy, undermining industry and being weak abroad. “He’s been a leader, far more than our president has been a leader,” said Trump in September.

This was strange, because every vice that Trump accused Clinton of, Putin has indulged in to a far greater degree. The Clinton Foundation may have taken donations from contacts she made, but Putin’s friends have indulged in kleptocratic behaviour on a scale that makes any American look positively miserly. Many of his friends from 1990s St Petersburg have fortunes in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars and Russia has worse inequality than any other major country.

Meanwhile, Russia’s manufacturing base has evaporated and the country is ever more dependent on commodity exports to stay solvent. The recent downturn in energy prices, combined with the impact of western sanctions imposed after Putin’s Ukraine adventure, has sunk the economy into a two-year recession.

When Putin took power, he promised to improve living standards and public health, fight corruption and rebuild basic infrastructure. And yet, 17 years on, 1.5 million Russians are HIV-positive and the number is rising by 10% a year. Alcoholism remains rife. Just before Christmas, more than 60 people died in the city of Irkutsk from drinking bath lotion containing methanol. The average Russian man can expect to die 13 years earlier than a man in the UK. Transparency International last year ranked Russia 119th on its corruption perceptions index, below the Philippines, Gabon, Mozambique and Pakistan.

This all makes Putin’s imperial robes look threadbare. But he is an emperor nonetheless, thanks to his armed forces. Even while the state budget has contracted, he has maintained his military budget at above 4% of GDP, more than double the share in Britain and higher even than the US. This has allowed him to oppose both liberalism and western foreign policy, a project made easier by Obama’s Middle East retreat.

Putin’s military adventures in Ukraine and Syria have proved wildly popular at home, kept his personal approval ratings above 80% and won him support from extremes of the political spectrum all over the world. He is willing to use violence with far greater brutality and recklessness than western democracies, with their risk-averse and war-weary electorates. This is, after all, a man who probably (in the words of a British judge) ordered the murder of ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko with a radioactive poison in central London.

“Russia has been a great power for centuries,” Putin told parliament during the hearings that confirmed him as prime minister in August 1999. “We should not drop our guard in this respect, neither should we allow our opinion to be ignored.”

In that regard, if in no others, it’s mission accomplished. No one is ignoring Russia’s opinion any more.• Comments will be opened later

Oliver Bullough is the author of The Last Man in Russia

THE PUTIN FILE

Born Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin 7 October 1952 in Leningrad. He studied law at Leningrad State University, where he joined the Communist party of the Soviet Union, before joining the KGB. He was head of the FSB, the KGB’s main successor agency, before Boris Yeltsin appointed him prime minister. Elected president in 2000, he has ruled Russia – either as president or prime minister – ever since.

Best of times After his forces took Grozny in early 2000, he flew down to visit them in a fighter jet, sealing the image of a young, vigorous president, as opposed to his doddery alcoholic predecessor.

Worst of times When thousands of young Muscovites, whose lifestyles were eroded as a result of the economic policy that he oversaw, marched against the victory of his party in parliamentary elections in 2011.

What he says “Comrade wolf... knows whom to eat. He is eating and listening to no one” – said of the US in 2006.

What others said “I know the press likes to focus on body language and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom. But the truth is that when we’re in conversations together, oftentimes it’s very productive.” Barack Obama