HE is, of course, the most dangerous man in the world.

In his 20-odd years in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin has trashed his own country, undermined the international order and left a trail of blood in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and, especially, Ukraine.

Russia’s authoritarian leader is now routinely talked of in the same breath as the worst and most murderous despots of Europe’s 20th century, Hitler and Stalin, Mussolini and Franco.

He is as bad as men come. But could Putin – or rather the violent security threat he poses – save the British union?

This is a question some observers of Scottish politics have been whispering ever since Russia massively escalated its long, unprovoked war against Ukraine 11 months ago.

Now there are people who say – out loud – that they have an answer. This week a Brexiteer former editor of The Scotsman broke cover to say he thought the new geopolitics, among other factors, made a nonsense of breaking up the union.

“There are thoughtful Scottish Nationalists who know this,” wrote Iain Martin in The Times. “I wonder which of them will be the first to acknowledge publicly what this all means – that it’s over.”

I too have been trying to figure out how Putin’s aggression will affect Scottish and wider international opinion about independence and the prospect of a sovereign Scottish state.

Mr Martin and others have a plausible-sounding tale to spin, that amid global uncertainty substantial numbers of Yes voters will revert to the status quo, to the perceived security of the British state.

They might well be proved right as the war grinds on. But – so far – there is no real evidence of anything like this happening.

Putin’s full-blown invasion in February last year has not turned out to be a game-changer in the independence opinion polls. Not yet anyway.

Yes did trail No in the spring of 2022 after Russian tanks rolled on Kyiv. But by the end of the year most polls put independence back ahead of union.

Zoom out and look at broader trends and our big constitutional debate still looks stuck in something close to a statistical dead-heat.

What is perhaps most important is that we do not have any publicly available qualitative data about how, or even if, international events have shaped opinions over the last year. Or, frankly, ever.

The kind of surveys needed to tease out voter thinking on, say, the war in Ukraine and Scottish independence would be hard to design and expensive to execute.

So, sorry, I am probably breaking a golden rule of column-writing. That is because I have been posing a question to which I do not have an answer. Will Putin end up buttressing Britain? Pass.

In fact, I don’t think anybody knows how Kremlin warmongering is going to play out in the long term, in any context. Because, well, at the risk of sounding glib, the future has not happened yet.

But that does not mean we cannot have a bash at exploring some of the issues without making rash predictions.

Because I think it is worth taking a step back and reminding ourselves just how dramatically the geopolitical backdrop of Scottish politics has changed over the last half century. And asking what, if any, effect this had on how we vote.

Take the first and failed devolution campaign. It was staged in 1979, at the height of the Cold War, when half of Europe was still behind an Iron Curtain.

Its rematch took place in a very different context. By 1998 the Soviet Union, the biggest multi-national state on the continent, had broken up, relatively but not entirely peacefully. Czechia and Slovakia had been through their velvet divorce. And Yugoslavia had splintered amid horrible violence.

So there were a lot of new nation-states in Europe when we voted for autonomy. And the most obvious geopolitical threat, the USSR, was gone.

This is the backdrop of the rise of the SNP too. They came to power before Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia first started seeding real doubts among experts about security in Europe.

By the time nationalists got their big vote in September 2014 Putin had seized Crimea and was waging a brutal proxy war in Donbas. Scots, of course, rejected independence. They did so amid some not insignificant hostility to the project from international actors, such as Barack Obama.

Then came the geopolitical catastrophe of Brexit. The UK, already far from the military and economic power it once was, lost significant diplomatic influence. And, in some quarters, even credibility.

Some European governments warmed at least a little to the idea of a Scottish state in the EU. And support for independence, albeit in fits and starts, edged up to its current levels. However, correlation – as if it needs to be said – is not evidence of causation.

I often find myself framing Scottish events in international contexts. But I don’t think global trends are always at the front of voters’ minds.

That does not mean the geopolitical backdrop does not affect the way voters think or partisans articulate their stances. It does. I think we can see how in the way some unionists rationalise relatively unsophisticated “too wee” narratives. Or how a good few nationalists project a Europeanist world-view which – as a cynic – I see as often more rhetorical than real.

We should be thinking about what the rise of Putinism means for Scotland.

So far the Russian leader has served as a low-info rhetorical device, as a political bogeyman.

Does our political and media class have the capacity to raise the level of public discourse on Russia or wider foreign and defence affairs? I am not confident it does. Not yet.

That does not mean Putin’s war will not put Scots off independence. But it does – let’s be honest – demonstrate that our political actors, activists and commentators tend to focus on the local, not the international.