I am not Ukranian. I am Pennsylvania Dutch on my father’s side; in other words, my father was descended from immigrants who came from the Rhine region of western Germany and settled in Pennsylvania in colonial times. My mother’s parents were Polish immigrants, but for a variety of reasons, I don’t normally think of myself as Polish-American, but lean into the Pennsylvania Dutch part of my heritage.

So no one is more surprised than I am that the unprovoked Russian attack on Ukraine a month ago is stirring up in me Polish passions I didn’t even realize I had. The Polish people have a long and unhappy history of getting pushed around by Russians, and the resentments run deep among those of us with Polish heritage—even if we don’t normally think of ourselves as Polish. Watching fellow Slavs get steamrollered by the Russians is all that it takes to reawaken those resentments. Folks in Poland are freaking out right about now, and I have no difficulty understanding why.

The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, made a catastrophically bad decision in attacking Ukraine. Until now, he’s seemed pretty clever. Russia has been punching above its weight for the past decade in international affairs, because Putin has shrewdly played to Russian strengths. Russian intelligence officials have traditionally been masters of propaganda and disinformation, going back to Imperial times. (The anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an Imperial Russian disinformation operation that is still taken seriously, at least by the profoundly ignorant, more than a century after it was created.)

Putin’s government expertly melded traditional Russian disinformation operations with modern internet communication to create huge disruptions among Russia’s competitors. Brexit was almost certainly a Russian disinformation campaign that thoroughly kneecapped the United Kingdom. The UK is no longer even a second-tier power, and it will take it decades to claw its way back into international relevance, if indeed that is even possible anymore. That it was done in the name of making Britain stronger is just the cherry on top of Vladimir Putin’s sundae.

Similarly, Russian disinformation put a Russian intelligence asset into the Oval Office, with disastrous consequences for the United States, and the Russians have a better than 50/50 shot of doing it again.

A couple of years ago, Vladimir Putin must have been laughing at the leadership of the old Soviet Union. They believed that in order to keep the US at bay, they had to spend enormous sums on missiles, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, and large armored formations stationed in East Germany, when he proved that for a fraction of the cost, you can set the Americans against each other so completely that they have no resources left over to oppose foreign threats.

But something happened last year. We can only guess what it was. I’ve heard that Putin’s health is deteriorating, and maybe crushing Ukraine was something on his bucket list that he felt he needed to check off before he departs for that Kremlin in the sky.

Whatever changed his thinking, it tempted him into making an egregious error. He shifted the field of battle from disinformation, where he held a huge advantage, to military confrontation, where he did not. Maybe he thought he did, but history also teaches us that the Russian military has frequently looked more fearsome on paper than it proved to be in actual conflict. Putin ignored that history, and now he (and his country) are paying the price.

You’d think a master of disinformation would understand that revealing too quickly what it is you really want will weaken your position. Yet here we are.

Putin’s public position seems to be that Ukrainians are not in fact a distinct ethnic group, but are in reality just Russians, and that the creation of a Ukrainian national identity is merely a Western plot to weaken Russia. That works great as a piece of disinformation, but what we’re seeing now is an object lesson in the dangers of falling for your own propaganda.

The reality is that there are some fifty million people worldwide who identify as Ukrainian, and they’re the only ones who get to have a vote on the matter. While it might be possible to gently persuade Ukrainians that their culture, their values, and their national interests are closely aligned with those of Russians, productive techniques for gentle persuasion do not include shelling residential neighborhoods in Ukrainian cities, or turning tens of millions of Ukrainians into refugees.

Far from tightening the bonds between Ukrainians and Russians, this war has driven a wedge between these two peoples, dividing them more deeply than ever. Take the word of this not-very-Polish Pole: the young Ukrainian children of today, made refugees and orphans by Putin’s war, will be lecturing their grandchildren in 2092 about the terrible things Russians did to Ukrainians. The bitterness and resentment created by this Russian invasion will became a part of the Ukrainian identity. They will also insure that Ukrainians will see Russians not as useful and culturally similar allies, but as a ruthless and untrustworthy foe, requiring Ukraine to look to nations more distant—geographically and culturally—for its protection.

Russia will certainly lose this war. Alas, what remains unclear is how much more suffering the Ukrainian people must bear before this truth sinks in at the Kremlin.