Some days, when I let my head get carried away, I wonder if the legacy of Covid isn’t quite a bit more than an uneasy awareness of the fragility of our way of life, if it isn’t more than long Covid. What if it has also brought us to the end of the long peace?

Did Putin sense that Covid had numbed a part of us all? Did Covid rot the part of our collective memory that spent 83 years consoling itself with the belief that next time a fascist invaded a country in Eastern Europe, we wouldn’t just sit around and say, well that’s a bit naughty, wouldn’t like to be Polish Ukranian right now, but it’s not really our affair, is it?

That next time we wouldn’t wait until it was too late. Did we forget that?