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At the time reports were emerging that US officials believed Kyiv could fall within one to four days, with Putin then expected to install a Kremlin puppet government and partition Ukraine. It would be up to Ukraine and its Western allies, I wrote, to ensure Putin did not achieve mastery over this historical turning point. In a piece for the New Statesman website that morning I argued that “precedents will be set in the next days: precedents about what is acceptable in the international system of the early-to-mid 21st century and what is not precedents that will shape the decades to come”. Within minutes, air-raid sirens and the first explosions were heard in cities across the country. Our faces.” Then, just before 5am local time, Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation”.
Ukraine’s president appealed directly to Russian citizens in their own language: “The people of Ukraine want peace,” he said, but warned that the country would defend itself: “While attacking, you will see our faces. In a ten-minute video address issued in the early hours of 24 February, after months of Russian troop build-ups on the Ukrainian border and increasingly deranged rhetoric from Moscow, Volodymyr Zelensky made a last-ditch plea for peace. The final act of that pre-invasion era was at one with the dark poetry of the moment. A time when a British prime minister could, as Boris Johnson had done in November, blithely declare that “the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on the European landmass are over”. A time before the place names Bucha and Irpin, Kramatorsk and Mariupol became bywords for the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 before the letter Z became emblematic of a new fascism before a new Iron Curtain fell over the continent before it became impossible to describe the Covid-19 pandemic as a “once in a decade” shock to the global system. It feels like an eternity ago, that grim wintry pre-dawn of Thursday 24 February.