Geography doesn’t change. To a slightly lesser extent, neither do historic patterns.
Even if Ukraine wins the Russo-Ukrainian War, Russia will still be to the east from Central Europe.
She will be back in one form or another.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, liberation, and joining NATO – helped with a lot of ahistorical thinking on both sides of the Atlantic – there was a bit of hedging that there was time to rebuild Central European economies and civil society before a threat from the east came back. For almost three decades the former Warsaw Pact members of NATO let their military capabilities and investments fall closer to 1% of GDP as opposed to the 2% minimum.
The events of the last decade have sobered up everyone from Estonia to Bulgaria, but for most of those nations, by free-riding on their richer nations to the west for national defense, they lost or allowed to almost die what domestic arms manufacturing they had remaining from communism.
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