None of us had seen this war coming, above all because we did not understand what its objectives might be. It appeared counterintuitive and illogical, as it still does even several days into the invasion.

Instead, today we are seeing the explosion of different factors operating across the most diverse timescales. The long-term factor is the definitive crisis of a nineteenth-century imperial-national idea that — “put in the attic” throughout the twentieth century by the Soviet experiment — is today anachronistically reasserted in the present by a government that cannot find any other identitarian glue. In the medium term, there is the chaotic and traumatic exit from the multinational, unitary experience of the USSR; the various state formations that emerged from this collapse share a substantial inability to reorganize the relations between countries linked by a thousand threads of history, ethnicity and identity. Then, in the here and now, there is Vladimir Putin’s attempt to “overturn the table” of a landscape of international relations in which time is working against him. If it still seems possible to Putin now to render Ukraine marginal and harmless to him, in five or ten years’ time this would have become patently impossible.

But, like it or not, to do imperialism you need the means, the ideas, and the allies to pull it off. And anyone who knows Eastern Europe is well aware that Moscow’s battle for hegemony in this region is already lost. Its Western borders are dotted with neighbors — from Tallinn to Bucharest, from Warsaw to Kiev — who want nothing more to do with it. When it comes to everything else, they may hate each other and step on each other’s toes, but on one thing they are unanimous: never again with Moscow.