That balance - or imbalance in Putin’s view - was the humiliating equivalent of the Versailles Treaty’s impositions on Germany after World War I. In acting this way today, though, Putin is not only aiming to unilaterally rewrite the rules of the international system that have been in place since World War II - that no nation can just devour the nation next door - he is also out to alter that balance of power that he feels was imposed on Russia after the Cold War. And everyone in the region knew he would devour as much as he could and there was no global community to stop him. Yes, the Russian attempt to seize Ukraine is a throwback to earlier centuries - before the democracy revolutions in America and France - when a European monarch or Russian czar could simply decide that he wanted more territory, that the time was ripe to grab it, and so he did. On the first day of the war, we saw invading Russian tank units unexpectedly being exposed by Google Maps, because Google wanted to alert drivers that the Russian armor was causing traffic jams. This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones, so acts of brutality will be documented and broadcast worldwide without any editors or filters. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower - but in a 21st-century globalized world. Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. But I’m going there now in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The seven most dangerous words in journalism are: “The world will never be the same.” In over four decades of reporting, I have rarely dared use that phrase.
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