Europe Gets a War and Nobody Knows What to Do With Their Hands

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and the post-Cold War world order cracked like a windshield. For weeks, Western intelligence had been warning it would happen. Most people didn't believe it because the idea of a ground war in Europe in 2022 sounded like a Tom Clancy plot that got rejected for being too on-the-nose. Then tanks rolled across the border and it was real. Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and actor who had played a president on TV before actually becoming one — a sentence that only makes sense in this timeline — refused to evacuate Kyiv and became an overnight symbol of resistance. "I need ammunition, not a ride" entered the canon of quotable wartime lines. The West responded with sanctions, weapons shipments, and a level of unity that surprised even the optimists. Gas prices spiked. Wheat prices spiked. The word "escalation" became dinner table conversation. Nuclear threats were made casually enough to make your Cold War-surviving grandparents deeply uncomfortable. The conflict would grind on far longer than anyone predicted, because wars always do.