Putin has redrawn the world - but not the way he wanted

Vladimir's Putin's invasion of Ukraine has changed the world. We are living in new and more dangerous times - the post-Cold War era that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall is over.

It is a rare thing to live through a moment of huge historical consequence and understand in real time that is what it is.

In November 1989, I stood on a snow-flecked Wenceslas Square in Prague, the capital of what was then Czechoslovakia, and watched a new world being born.

The peoples of Communist Eastern Europe had risen in defiance of their dictatorships. The Berlin Wall had been torn down. A divided Europe was being made whole again.

In Prague, the dissident playwright Vaclav Havel addressed a crowd of 400,000 from a second-floor balcony. It was an exhilarating moment, dizzying in its pace. That evening, the Communist regime collapsed and within weeks Havel was president of a new democratic state. I sensed, even at the time, that I had watched the world pivot - that it was one of those rare moments when you know the world is remaking itself before your eyes.

How many such moments had there been in the history of Europe since the French Revolution? Probably, I thought then, about five. This, 1989, was the sixth.

But that world - born in those dramatic popular revolutions - came to an end when Putin ordered Russian forces into Ukraine.

The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called this moment a zeitenwende - a turning point - while UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said it was a "paradigm shift". The age of complacency, she said, was over.