What to say, if I had to say something? I was in a room full of people for whom the Russian invasion of Ukraine doesn't resonate with anything, has no echoes. They have no recollection of the Cold War, let alone of hot wars. They have no experience of spheres of influence. They didn't grow up with the continued reverberations of the Prague Spring, or the glory that was Glasnost, the giddy time of the "Peace Dividend," the prosaic satisfactions of the European Union. For all the frictions, civil unrest, overt and covert interventions (many American) that of course continue to happen, they know only a world with fixed borders - borders they know are arbitrary, in too many cases unjust artifacts of European empires, but still somehow a stable part of the landscape. Can they fathom the vertigo that Vladimir Putin's increasingly brazen (and successful) violations of established borders brings to older generations? Perhaps they can't imagine it because we believed military invasions were a thing of the past.
