That’s the question of the hour.

No one seems quite sure.

For a while, he seemed nearly like America’s savior, speaking eloquently and with force against the ridiculous trends of wokeness and gender blurring and assorted other Western oppression and misdirections.

But there is mystery.

Two diplomats, Fiona Hill, a former member of the U.S. National Security Council, who served in Russia for years as a Putin “watcher,” and Clifford G. Gaddy, an economist specializing in Russia, now at the Brookings Institution, take a skeptical, even cynical view.

In their book, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings Institution Press), they detail Putin’s mysterious catapulting from the shadows of the KGB to political stardom during the 1990s, in a truly remarkably short period, to his current status as savior-warrior-miscreant.

“Some observers say that Vladimir Putin has no face, no substance, no soul,” they write. “He is a ‘man from nowhere,’ who can appear to be anybody to anyone.

“Indeed, as president and prime minister, Mr. Putin has turned himself into the ultimate political performance artist. Over the last several years, his public relations team has pushed his image in multiple directions, pitching him as everything from big game hunter and conservationist to scuba diver to biker — even nightclub crooner.

“Leaders of other countries have gained notoriety for their flamboyant or patriotic style of dressing to appeal to and rally the masses — like Fidel Castro’s and Hugo Chavez’s military fatigues, Yasser Arafat’s ubiquitous keffiyeh scarf, Muammar Qaddafi’s robes (and tent).

“But Putin has outdressed them all.

“He has appeared in an endless number of guises for encounters with the press or Russian special interest groups, or at times of crisis, as during raging peat bog fires around Moscow in 2010, when he was transformed into a fire-breathing airplane pilot.

“All this with the assistance, it would seem, of the Kremlin’s inexhaustible wardrobe and special props department.”

What about those photos of him every year on Feast of the Orthodox Epiphany, lowering himself as penance into ice-cold water?

Or lighting church candles — wearing pendants of the Virgin, even kissing her icon?

Stay tuned.

We will report — all sides.

You discern.

[resources: video of Michael Brown online retreat: Entering the Time of the Secrets]