The barbaric attack of Russia on Ukraine came as a powerful shock to many of us. When the war exploded on our screens it seemed incomprehensible and irrational. The wanton destruction of urban neighbourhoods very similar to the world I grew up in struck me as almost unbelievable.

Meanwhile, the narratives coming out of Russia suggested their dictator had become captive to an absolutist ethno-nationalist narrative with moralistic overtones that were being used to justify unspeakable violence.

The war in Ukraine has cast a shadow over 75 years of comfortable Western beliefs about civilisational progress, the universal attractiveness and eventual victory of liberal democracies,...