Two days after President Vladimir Putin sent his armed forces into Ukraine, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti published an article that assumed imminent victory. It celebrated "a new era,” marked by the end of Western domination, the severing of bonds between the U.S. and continental Europe and the return of Russia to its rightful "space and place” in the world.
As the war rages on, heralding the arrival of a single Russian World to unite Ukraine with Belarus and Russia looks at best premature. RIA Novosti soon took the article down. But the author was right about one thing: Putin’s decision to invade does appear to be changing the international order, just not necessarily in the way he planned.
From Berlin to London and Baltic capitals like Tallinn, the metrics of defending Europe have been torn up. A large scale war is no longer unthinkable and nations are reconsidering what they spend, what they buy, and how they would need to fight.