First of all Putin will have weighed up the effects of the Trump era, which gouged deep wounds into American society and its institutions, the spread of suspicion among Washington’s allies, and factored in the vulnerability experienced by the power seated in Kyiv when the former US president put a freeze on military assistance unless Ukrainian president Zelensky helped him undermine Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential run.

Let us not forget this led to Trump’s first impeachment trial. In a year where Trumpism will dictate success in the midterms for Republicans and the subsequent stonewalling of Biden’s mandate, the timing is perfect to test Biden’s appetite for a return to Europe to protect allies and partners, such as Ukraine.

Secondly, Putin undoubtedly saw the summer 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan as the end of an era for American hegemony. He witnessed the widespread reaction describing the withdrawal as a humiliation. He will have taken note of the dissension among NATO allies and will have kept an eye on Biden’s difficulties navigating a polarised congress. The AUKUS agreement, signed shortly after the fall of Kabul, would prove too difficult a wound to heal, or so he will have surmised.

Thirdly, Putin will have viewed Ukraine’s 2019 constitutional amendment, under then president Petro Poroshenko, as a grievous decision. It wrote into the country’s Foundation laws a path to join both NATO and the European Union. Ukraine’s ascent to the status of candidate country should not be delayed further than 2023.

Fourthly Putin will have followed the political, commercial, and institutional misadventures in the UK over Brexit, combined with Boris Johnson’s growing difficulties with constituents and parliamentarians as a result of consecutive breaches of lockdown rules. In short, that Europe’s strongest defensive power was mired in domestic scandal. At the same time, Putin knew France would soon launch into a fierce presidential campaign with three rabid Russian sympathizers running against Macron, all during a half-year where Paris would no doubt take more of an appeasing than aggressive stance, once it had come into the presidency of the Council of the European Union.

Fifthly Putin will have seen Angela Merkel, an advocate of economic ties and fuel imports from Moscow, step down. and in her place rise an untried coalition, with unexplored differences, that has yet to make a name for itself in Europe. It was also the right time to play the energy card. Prices had climbed steadily for a few months, enabling Putin to consolidate his superior position as a supplier, and bend everything and everyone to his will.

Sixth in terms of angles, is that Putin has sustained the rise of a number of loyal oligarchs in European markets. They have grown dominant footprints in real-estate property, football, banking, telecoms, oil companies and agribusinesses. These have all served a higher purpose: to patiently burrow into Western societies and undermine them, make them dependent, in a cynical game convenient to all.

Seventh: As European parties and parliaments frayed, still reeling from the great financial squeeze of 2008, and with Putin having spent years funding and indoctrinating fringe parties — and even some established ones — on the right and the left, sowing lies across media campaigns that led to outcomes like Brexit, sabotaging the French presidential election, the Netherlands referendum on a Ukraine-EU trade agreement, and no less the American presidential election, he saw his window of opportunity. Along the way, he offered positions to European politicians who had been side-lined. He courted others on active duty. He showed them all that not only was Russia back in the limelight of Western decisionmaking but also that no key decision would stick if it defied the Kremlin’s will.

Eighth. To Putin, rising inflation, ballooning prices of raw material and power, supply chain disruptions and the beginnings of economic recovery in Europe represented inhibitory factors that would discourage Europe from antagonising Russia on the economic plane. Europe would depend on Russia for energy, and future sanctions would not go forward without a unanimous vote from the EU.

Finally, as the Winter Olympics began in Beijing in early February, Putin made a commitment to China that was unusual but extremely ambitious and provided him with meaningful support. Committing to a thirty-year supply via Kazakhstan and other pipelines in development, he ensured China need not rely as much on the unpredictable flows from the Persian Gulf and the Malacca Strait. And then, they stood jointly against NATO’s eastward expansion, expressing at the same time a shared concern over the trilateral defence agreement on the Pacific that now binds the US, the UK and Australia.

Thirty years after Ukraine gained its independence, the post-Cold War is at an end.

The Russian invasion attempts to settle a dispute with History — it is the refusal to acknowledge a sovereign, free, independent Ukraine, with full territorial integrity, and no less, the denial of any right the country might have to join western organisations. In other words, if Ukrainian independence put the capstone on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, stamping out Ukraine’s sovereign status would somehow bring back the Russian Empire Putin would like to rebuild.

To that end, he may not annex Ukraine, as he did the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. It may be enough to control a significant portion of its territory; predictably, the part with the most Russian speakers, the axis from Kharkiv to the border with Transnistria in Moldova; and effect regime change in Kyiv. But what for? To bring about a new vassal state in the image of Lukashenko’s Belarus, ensuring total demilitarization (long-term surrender, in practice), approve a constitution defined by neutrality and erase any pretence of joining NATO or the European Union.

If Putin achieves his ends, he will bring Russia to NATO’s doorstep — not pull away. And he will have done it through military might, violating international agreements and stepping over the terms that have informed European security since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is this scenario that has brought Ukraine’s identity to the world stage, which has highlighted the importance of preserving democracy and demonstrated the moral emptiness of authoritarian regimes.

It has re-centred NATO in the landscape of European security, energised cohesion in the European Union, effected radical behaviour changes in some European countries, such as Germany, and advanced the geostrategic significance of places like Turkey. No less, it summons ghosts of cursed decades, the phantom of nuclear war, the levelling of cities, and a new multitude of war refugees now fleeing their homes.

It might be realistic to prepare for the worst so that we can then, creatively, and steadily, devise a path to break through the black fog that now hangs over this Europe of ours.