I bumped into Vladimir Putin in Chile, in 2004, when we were both in Santiago for the annual conference of leaders from twenty-one nations on both sides of the Pacific. Putin was strutting across the hotel lobby in that distinctly quick duck-footed waddle that twists his upper torso and makes him look like a mechanical toy. His gaggle of security guards elbowed me aside to let him pass. What struck me—a small female—was how small he was, too. In a brief exchange of glances, we were at eye level.

“He walks like someone who thinks, How do I walk like a cool guy?” a seasoned Russia expert told me, as Russians went to the polls last weekend.

That image of Putin recurs every time I see pictures of him tracking tigers, swimming in Siberia, practicing judo, flying a hang glider, riding horseback bare-chested, or scoring hockey goals. At sixty-five, the diminutive leader of the world’s largest country, which covers eleven time zones spanning two continents, still seems to be a little man obsessed with proving his bigness—physically and politically, at home and on the global stage.

During his third term as President, which began in 2012, Putin and his allies grew increasingly ambitious, seizing Crimea, in 2014, intervening in Syria’s civil war, in 2015, meddling in the 2016 American Presidential election, allegedly plotting the assassinations of exiles and dissidents over the past couple of years, and, shortly before the 2018 Russian Presidential election, boasting of a new nuclear weapon capable of evading U.S. missile defenses.

When I was in Moscow last month, billboards abounded with Putin’s picture, captioned “Strong President—strong Russia.” So now that Putin has won a fourth term and six more years in office, the looming question is what he plans next to make Russia even stronger, especially in his rivalry with the West. Will the former K.G.B. operative—who for decades was a dedicated servant of the Communist Party and a spy for the Soviet Union—become even more aggressive in trying to unravel the liberal Western order that has dominated the world for decades? And is he stoppable?

“He is not necessarily a Soviet man, but he is a Cold War man. And he’s a K.G.B. man,” Nina Khrushcheva, the granddaughter of the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, reflected at an event at the New School, in New York, last month. “And, for every K.G.B. officer, it was a dream to be known or to be thought of as somebody who can take down American democracy. For him, that image around the world would probably be even more important than this kind of partnership and parity with the United States.”

In a new report, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank with a branch in Moscow, warns that Putin’s Russia is now “casting a far broader net and effectively chipping away at the U.S.-led international order.” Besides Ukraine, Syria, and the U.S. elections—the exemplars of Russia’s disruptive intentions—the report cites its arms sales to undermine key U.S. alliances, exploitation of Europe’s divisions, embrace of populist candidates globally, propping up of the crisis-riddled Venezuelan government, stoking of ethnic tensions in the Balkans, fuelling of high-level corruption in South Africa, leveraging of information to influence Mexico’s 2018 election, and methodical spawning of a worldwide propaganda network to challenge the Western order.

Western powers long considered resistant to Russian mischief are increasingly vulnerable. Britain is now investigating whether Russia tried to manipulate the 2016 referendum on Brexit. In Germany, Russia allegedly exploited tensions over immigration to undermine Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s strongest advocate for aiding desperate refugees from war-torn countries. Moscow is blamed, for example, for planting a false story about a thirteen-year-old German girl abducted by migrants that emotionally skewed Germany’s immigration debate in the run-up to its election last year. Meanwhile, Spain has charged Russia with fomenting support for the Catalan referendum on independence in 2017.

“Russia’s more assertive foreign policy is making the Kremlin an important player in an expanding array of countries and regions,” the Carnegie report concludes. Given the disarray in the West right now, Putin will try to further expand his sway. “Where the United States and its allies have pulled back or failed to deliver, Russia has eagerly stepped in.”

Putin’s gains are now tangible. Putinesque candidates did well in recent Italian and German elections, while countries that had left the Soviet orbit—Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia—have warmed to Moscow again. Middle Eastern nations—such disparate bedfellows as Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia—have far better relations today with Putin’s Russia. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, often consults with Putin when there are problems on the Syrian or Lebanese borders. Putin’s military intervention in the Syrian civil war, since 2015, has expanded Russia’s access to an air base in Latakia and gained for Russia the use of a naval base in Tartus, with an entryway to the Mediterranean for the Russian fleet—a strategic game-changer for the West.

Putin has long flouted international institutions and the diplomatic rules of engagement among nations, even treaties that Russia signed and ratified. But his government is purportedly—and conspicuously—growing even more brazen. As Russians were voting on Sunday, the British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, told the BBC of new evidence that Russia has been secretly stockpiling the deadliest known nerve agent, “very likely for the purpose of assassination.” After the murder attempt against a former Russian double agent earlier this month, Britain also announced that it would look into fourteen other suspicious murders of Russians on its soil. The use of nerve agents represents an astounding violation of a seminal international treaty banning chemical weapons that Moscow signed in the nineties.

Yet, as he begins his fourth term, Putin may not be as powerful as he appears, even though he has now dominated Russian politics for nearly two decades. “Americans tend to think of Putin as cold and calculating. But we should not treat this election as Superman Three becomes Superman Four,” Stephen Sestanovich, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large to the former Soviet states, told me. “Russians don’t describe him that way at all. He finds decisions hard, defers and defers, and then makes them impulsively. Much of the Putin personality we’ve come to know and love is an invention—but a pretty good invention. He carries all the confidence of a summer intern.”

Putin’s record is still mixed. “In foreign policy, he’s done some things that are unprecedented and bold, but, all in all, it has played out for him in a way that ordinarily would occasion second thoughts,” Sestanovich said. “He’s an international pariah. He’s got a war on his hands in Syria that he keeps saying is over, but keeps not being over. In a recent poll, forty-nine per cent of Russians said they wanted to get out of Syria. Putin’s got a Ukraine problem that he doesn’t seem able to solve. In most other regions, the results are kind of paltry, above all in Europe, which is the realm the Russians have for centuries put first. It’s the region Putin has screwed up the worst.”

Washington’s disarray under President Trump is a partial success for the Kremlin. “Putin succeeded beyond his wildest imagination in identifying the weakness in our political system and sowing bigger chaos in 2016,” Bill Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia who is now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. “He sees Trump’s erratic behavior and polarization as serving his purposes. He concluded years ago that the way to create greater space for Russia in the world was to chip away at the United States. What he did in Syria was another way to chip away at the American position in the world and exert Russian pressure.”

On Tuesday, Trump revealed his intention to meet Putin in “the not-too-distant future” to discuss the arms race, North Korea, Syria, and Ukraine. The surprise announcement followed Trump’s call to Putin to congratulate him on his reëlection. Trump described the conversation as “very good.” His statement came within minutes of a bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee recommending tougher measures to stop Russian meddling in the 2018 midterm elections. In a scathing tweet, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, blasted Trump. “An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections. And by doing so with Vladimir Putin, President Trump insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election.”