No. 3: Putin, beyond the hour-and-a-half of verbal diarrhea he unleashed on us, has a goal. Only one. To weaken Ukraine. To bring it to its political knees. To break the democratic élan launched eight years ago by the citizenry assembled in Kyiv’s Maidan. His method was calumny, offense, the transformation into fascists of the hundreds of youths who died clutching the starred flag of Europe. And he had another method: sending the little green men of the FSB to Donbass with batches of Russian passports; the open mustering of his army to stop an alleged genocide; then, in the days that followed, an occupation in the style of Prague or Budapest. He did both. It’s a historic crime against Ukraine and a frontal attack on Europe and the West.

No. 4: We hear this one a lot: The diplomats will have to be back on the scene to help Putin calm down, to stop him, to help him save face. Maybe. I don’t know. But one thing is sure. We should not reverse the roles and lose sight of the fact that it was Putin, and he alone, who broke the taboo over war in Europe. We must remember that it’s Ukraine, and Ukraine alone, that honor commands us to save from an atrocious and announced offensive. And, even if things end there and we can breathe a sigh of shameful relief, it behooves us to never forget how, well before today’s troubles, from last December and January, the Kremlin described Europe as a wide-ranging “theater of military conflict” (Alexander Grushko, deputy minister of foreign affairs); brandished the threat of a “preventive” nuclear strike of the kind Israel wields against Iran (Andrey Kartapolov, chair of the Duma’s Defense Committee); and let partisan and friendly media (Svobodnaya Pressa) announce that, in the case of an enlarged NATO, Russia would vitrify “all of Europe and two-thirds of the United States in thirty minutes.” No peace agreement could erase these staggering declarations, without precedent, which I assembled in a piece from Jan. 18. Or else, it would be a Munich-style peace.