Donald Trump should not have been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. That’s not to make the schoolboy error of presuming the award to be a badge of moral approval: I know it merely recognises the individual who has dominated the previous 12 months, for good or ill. (It’s why Time has no reason to regret handing the 1938 accolade to Adolf Hitler.)

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Even so, and even though Trump was clearly the biggest news story of 2016, he still should not have won. For there is another figure who looms larger over this annus horribilis, albeit from the shadows. He ends this year with a wolfish grin, content that almost all his dreams have come true. That man is Vladimir Putin.

He surveys the global landscape and sees almost every sign pointing his way. From Aleppo to the White House, from post-truth to Brexit, this is the year the world was reshaped in his image. He may not have been the guiding hand behind every shift, though he certainly gave several of them a nudge, but together they made him 2016’s biggest winner.

Start with Syria, which even in this year of horrors surely merits a special infamy of its own. The leaders of western nations ritually condemn the catastrophe that has been visited upon the people of Aleppo, eloquently denouncing the bombing of hospitals, including makeshift clinics hidden in basements, the flattening of civilian areas, the killing of children, the denial of food and medicine. And yet Putin knows he need not listen. Because the important fact is the one on the ground: no one has stopped him or his Syrian vassal, Bashar al-Assad, from continuing the slaughter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Syrian pro-government forces in Aleppo’s Jdeideh neighbourhood. ‘Putin has proved that it is possible to kill or dispossess millions of civilians with impunity.’ Photograph: George Ourfalian/AFP/Getty Images

Plenty have warned that Aleppo will be the Guernica of our generation, remembered among the greatest crimes against humanity. Future historians will ask all the same shaming questions. Why was there not more outrage? Did people not know – or just not care? Why did they not act? But there is another comparison. For Aleppo has received the treatment Putin once meted out to Grozny, when Chechnya dared rebel against Moscow. In 1999 it too was bombed into what the UN called a “devastated wasteland”, an act of destruction tolerated because it was deemed to be taking place on Russia’s turf.

But the de facto permission granted to Putin’s smashing of Syria counts as an even greater victory for the Russian dictator. Not only has he advanced his narrow, strategic interests, maintaining a presence in the Middle East and, in Tartus, a deep-water port with access to the Mediterranean. He has won a less tangible but more valuable prize. He has proved that it is possible to kill or dispossess millions of civilians with impunity.

Of course, some will say George W Bush proved that with his invasion of Iraq in 2003. But until now, Moscow might have felt constrained by the precedent of Slobodan Milošević, fearing that there were limits to how much blood you could shed before, eventually, the west or the US or Nato would act. Now Putin has established beyond doubt that there are no limits. Partly because of Iraq, and the fatigue it left behind, he has seen that once-serious international talk of a “responsibility to protect” endangered civilians is a dead letter. You can kill hundreds of thousands and no one will do a thing.

But 2016 has provided Putin with other reasons to be cheerful. He now has friends in high places, or in places about to get higher. The most obvious is Trump, but there are others, both near and far. Indeed, November was a banner month for the Russian leader, bringing pro-Putin candidates to power in Moldova, Bulgaria and Estonia, as well as teeing up a win-win French presidential contest in 2017. There is a good chance the final round will pit two Putin fans against each other: François Fillon v Marine Le Pen.

Like most on the European far right, Le Pen has long revered Putin as a nationalist strongman and was happy to take a €9m (£8m) loan from a Russian-backed bank. Less predictably Fillon, who will be the standard bearer of the centre-right, also gazes moon-eyed at Putin. Fillon wants to see the lifting of sanctions imposed on Moscow over Ukraine and believes Putin, the conqueror of Crimea, is the injured party, since it was all the western powers’ fault that Russia invaded in the first place.

Wherever he looks, Putin can see allies – whether it’s Nigel Farage on the right or US Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein on the left. (Stein boasted during the campaign that she had dined with Russia’s leader, even sitting at the same table.) Indeed, given the regimes now ruling Hungary and Poland, Putin can smile at the emergence of what political scientist Yascha Mounk calls “the illiberal international”, an arc of states led by people who, like him, regard the free press or an independent judiciary as unnecessary irritants.

Yet democratic votes have been good to Putin this year. Brexit was an early gift to a man who has long seen the weakening of the European Union as a strategic goal. Ideally, he’d like to see the EU break up: then he could make a series of bilateral deals with Europe’s nations, picking them off one by one. That’s the long game; but just to have the EU weakened, distracted and destabilised will do for now. And with Britain’s departure, the EU will lose one of its loudest Putin-wary voices.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Wherever he looks, Putin can see allies – whether it’s Nigel Farage (pictured) on the right or US Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein on the left.’ Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

But of course the sweetest victory came on 8 November. Donald Trump veered wildly during the campaign, but one of the few stances he maintained with iron consistency was his admiration for Putin. The autocrat certainly did all he could to return the favour. As one Kremlin ally puts it, “Maybe we helped a bit with WikiLeaks.” They certainly did.

Few credible sources doubt that Russia was behind the hacking of internal Democratic party emails, whose release by Julian Assange was timed to cause maximum pain to Hillary Clinton and pleasure for Trump. As a former KGB man, Putin must be proud of what is surely the most successful espionage operation in history, one that succeeded beyond even Moscow’s expectations – installing an admirer and sycophant in the White House.

As a former KGB man, he must be proud of what is surely the most successful espionage operation in history

The benefits are obvious. Given Trump’s lukewarm commitment to Nato and the defence of its members, Putin will now have all but a free hand. As one Russia expert observes: “Seen from Moscow, the west has not been in such inviting disarray since the Suez crisis of 1956. Whatever constraints Putin may now feel upon his land-grabbing instincts, Nato is no longer one of them.”

As the year closes, each day brings new delights for the master of the Kremlin. The US is about to be led by a serial, if not compulsive liar; the public conversation of the west is polluted by fake news. This new, post-truth world is pure Putinism. For years his propaganda effort, typified by his TV channel Russia Today, has been aimed not so much at pushing a single message as sowing confusion, making even solid facts seem unsteady. As a mission, it once seemed futile when pitted against the solid framework of fact and reason, carefully constructed during the two centuries since the enlightenment. But those timbers have proved alarmingly easy to rot.

He may not have done all this himself. But it counts as a historic achievement nonetheless. If 2016 has been an awful year, and it has, then its true face belongs to Vladimir Putin.