Russian president Vladimir Putin overnight ordered the defence minister and the chief of the military to put nuclear deterrent forces in a “special regime of combat duty”, possibly referring to readying tactical nuclear forces. This could of course be a bluff, but Putin has demonstrated on numerous occasions he has a cavalier disrespect for human life and for the planet, and that he is willing to take extreme risks to achieve his strategic goals.

As a peace researcher for over 40 years, it appals me that in 2022 we are trying to make sense of an outmoded 20th century invasion aimed at changing borders and seizing sovereignty. This war is the most blatant act of cross border aggression that I have seen since the Second World War and a major contravention of the UN Charter.

There are two competing narratives about Russia’s push into Ukraine. One holds that President Vladimir Putin has adopted Hitler’s playbook over Sudetenland and failing to check his aggression will fall into the trap of the appeasement at Munich in 1938. The alternative holds that Putin is executing the NATO playbook in Kosovo in 1999.

Every great power needs an organising principle of foreign policy; great powers rise and fall on the tide of history and no power remains great forever; no great power retreats forever; there’s no way to reliably judge whether a great power has begun its descent into permanent decline or is merely in temporary retreat; and geopolitical fault lines during periods of power transition are fraught with grave risks of war rooted in miscalculations of relative power.

Proving that history does irony, banks that once feared masked robbers now fear mask-free customers. But does history also do mockery? The 1984 Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away on Boxing Day in Cape Town. Almost a decade ago, Tutu refused to share the stage with former British prime minister Tony Blair in Johannesburg, saying he should be in the dock in The Hague answering for war crimes.

After constant Cold War rhetoric and sabre-rattling, the presidents of the USA and Russia talk to each other about the Ukraine conflict and more generally about the security architecture in Europe. The EU is directly affected but is left out and wonders.