Each day the news from Ukraine is more horrific than the last.

First missiles hit civilian areas. Russian troops open fire on people fleeing towns surrounded on all sides.

Then comes the news that three people, including a child, were killed and 17 people, including pregnant women and doctors, were injured when a maternity hospital was shelled in the city of Mariupol.

This was, according to Sergei Orlov, the deputy-mayor of Mariupol, the third hospital to have been attacked.

He told the BBC: “I am absolutely sure that they know about this facility.

“This is the third hospital that they have destroyed in the city. The previous day they destroyed hospital number nine by artillery shelling. This was a Covid hospital with 300 beds.

“They have also attacked and destroyed a blood collection station in Mariupol. So, it is the third hospital, I’m absolutely sure they know what are their targets.”

In response James Heappey, the armed forces minister, said he believed the attack to be a war crime, saying: “We ask ourselves the question how did this happen? Was it an indiscriminate use of artillery or missiles into a built-up area, or was a hospital explicitly targeted?

“Both are equally despicable, both, as the Ukrainians have pointed out, would amount to a war crime.”

Mr Heappey may ask how this happened. But there should be no surprise that it did happen.

For over a decade Vladimir Putin has shown exactly what he is capable of in Syria, Crimea, Chechnya, and Georgia.

Former defence minister Sir Gerald Howarth, who was also chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on Ukraine, listed just some of the warning signs.

He said: “The annexation of part of Georgia in 2008. The annexation of Crimea in 2014. The poisoning of the Skripals – an attack on British soil. The locking up of Alexei Navalny. Putin’s behaviour in Syria.”

We could add the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and the assassination of Putin-critic Boris Nemtsov on a bridge near the Kremlin in 2015.

These atrocities are nothing new.

“Putin has no interests in playing by the rules of war. He is a tyrant,” said Sir Gerald.

If so far, we have known what Putin is capable of then perhaps we know what he could still do?

In Syria, UN investigators found that the Russia-backed Assad government had used chemical weapons on multiple occasions, killing dozens of people in some cases.

Now, Western governments fear the Russian leader may resort to the use of the banned weapons as he fails to make the progress expected in conquering his neighbour.

Asked if the use of such weapons would be a “red line” for the UK, foreign secretary Liz Truss said: “We are very concerned about the potential use of chemical weapons.

“Now, of course, we’ve seen Russia use these weapons before in fields of conflict, but that would be a grave mistake on the part of Russia, adding to the grave mistakes that have already been made by Putin.”

If chemical weapons are used, Western governments can hardly feign surprise.

Sir Gerald said: “What we face is a range of potential scenarios, all of which are entirely believable.

“One of which is that he ceases all pretence of just targeting infrastructure and military objectives and just adopts the Grozny or Aleppo solution which is to wipe out the cities.

“He might continue to ratchet up his threat to use nuclear weapons, he might even deploy theatre nuclear weapons.

“We don’t know. We don’t know the state of the man’s mind.

“The job of our leaders now is to start believing that some of those extreme scenarios could be borne out by fact and could actually happen instead of the wishful thinking that we've followed for the last 15 years.

“We are where we are because of our weakness, our naivety and our complacency.”

This war is terrible. But the West should have seen it coming because Putin has done this before.