Almost a year after the Russian invasion, war has become an everyday reality in Central Europe. What seemed unimaginable in the years after 1991 is today a fact that is part of the economy of news flows: bombed cities, confrontations in the trenches, crimes against humanity, terror, death, devastation.

This year, with its barbaric attack, Putin’s Russia entered the family of aggressors: closer to Nazism, fascism and Stalinism than to our time, Russia knows the culmination of a historical involution. The appearance of modernization of the post-Soviet decades has now been permanently removed. The synthesis of totalitarianism, militarism and gang crime is the image of Russia embodied by Putin.

This year, Russia’s war against Ukraine eliminated the already weakened and vulnerable framework of international law: in addition to isolation, military support, solidarity, the dramatic reality is the impunity of the aggressor state. Nuclear blackmail and international complicity make Putin’s Russia a player capable of carrying out terror without any concrete consequences. Every day of war is proof of the limits of economic sanctions. The Russian military machine, no matter how technically primitive it is, is no less active. Its goal is the same — the destruction of Ukraine as a step in the direction of Soviet restoration.

The political imagination of Putin’s Russia in this context of totalitarian mobilization is Stalinist. The ceremonies marking the Battle of Stalingrad became Stalin’s apotheosis. The Generalissimo becomes the image of a great country. Gulags, murders, crimes against humanity are a low note in this official version of Russian history. For the residents of Eastern and Central Europe, the Stalinist restoration in Moscow causes historical trauma. Mass graves in Katyn, the division of the Baltic states and Romania, deportations – these are the scenes from the chronicles of the 20th century that our memory will never forget.

The Russian state in this period of aggression is a machine for killing and exporting terror. From military tactics to language, Soviet contempt for human life triumphs. The waves of prisoners sent to death, the shelling of cities with rockets, the glorification of barbarism, the growth of private armed formations led by war veterans, all point to profound changes: the criminality of the Russian state is a dimension that can no longer be ignored. Putin’s system has created cancerous metastases that spread with each passing day of the war.

The war in Ukraine is part of this level of historical mutations. The illusion of eternal peace, the utopian hope for harmony between nations, the ambition of accelerated disarmament are all part of a past that seems so distant. The war is close to us, and only the resistance of Ukraine does not allow this wave of Soviet imperialism to rush over us again. Armies are not relics of the past, but the guarantor of our freedom. Russia’s challenge can only be met with Atlantic firmness.

Ukraine’s resistance prevented Russia from conducting its own blitzkrieg: instead of rapid attacks, the slaughter of battles of attrition has now ended. But this resistance cannot continue in the absence of solidarity that allows the martyred nation to fight. Economically, militarily and diplomatically, the battle that the Ukrainians are waging is also the battle of the West. For Europe in the neighborhood of Russia, the mortal threat of Russia is closer than ever. The memory of the tragedy after 1939 is indelible.

In the absence of a decisive victory at the front, Russian policy relies on consolidating illegal annexations over time: the battle line may eventually become a line of demarcation, a border between the Russian Empire and the West. , in the conditions of territorial mutilation of Ukraine. The prospects for such a future are equivalent to a new division of Eastern Europe: this time the Berlin Wall will move to the east of Ukraine. Romania, Poland, the Baltic states will come face to face with an enemy that knows no peace, only a truce. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro