Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, changed everything for Ukraine, for Europe, and for global politics. The world entered a new era of great-power rivalry in which war could no longer be excluded. Apart from the immediate victims, Russia’s aggression most concerned Europe. A great power seeking to extinguish an independent smaller country by force challenges the core principles upon which the European order of states has organized itself for decades.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war stands in stark contrast to the self-dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, which occurred in a largely non-violent manner. Since the “Gorbachev miracle” – when the Soviet Union started pursuing liberalizing reforms in the 1980s – Europeans had begun to imagine that Immanuel Kant’s vision of perpetual peace on the continent might be possible. It was not.

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