The Birth of a new Epoch

How long we have ached for this moment of clarity! After three decades of asymmetry and confusion, Putin is finally giving us a clear villain again, against whose aggression hundreds of thousands took to the streets today in Berlin alone. Only a week ago, I was sure that he would not dare a military invasion of Ukraine, because the price would simply be far too high. He did it anyway and caused a horror from which the world is now slowly reawakening from its state of shock - stronger and braver than ever.

What at first glance looked like the mighty offensive of a great power is shrinking day by day into the last gasp of a regime still living in the last century. All the offensives that Putin has pushed since 1999 have in fact been mere defensive wars of a reactionary dictator. So also this time. Ukraine had already irreversibly decided in favor of an open, diverse and democratic society, but the Russian president - fearing for his own power - never accepted this and, completely misjudging the situation, has now launched an unwinnable invasion.

This desperate act is a sign of eminent weakness; Putin now stands before us naked, stripped and exposed as an inhuman warmonger. In our complex world, this new unambiguity is liberating and, in the postmodern confusion, provides a long-missing sense of unity, a gathering of all democratic forces, and that is just the beginning. The currently much-cited "epoch break" is not only the end of the old epoch, with its reactionaries from Trump to Erdogan to Putin - at this fault line the birth of an entire new epoch is taking place.

A new conflict of systems is looming on the horizon, one that leaves behind the identitarian fragmentation of recent decades but has little in common with the historic Cold War. The global compass needles are realigning themselves between the transnational forces of democracy and the isolationist forces of autocracy. This has already begun with the caesuras of 2016, in the wake of which the political camps in Germany also reordered themselves - between the transnational Greens on the one hand and the nationalist AfD on the other.

Putin's war mania is now driving the development of this conflict line further and doing a disservice to all his brothers in spirit, especially Chinese dictator Xi Jinping - since the price for this war of aggression on Ukraine could be regime change in Russia in the medium term and thus the new beginning of Russian democracy. An ally that the autocratic alliance cannot actually do without.

But there is still a long way to go, tonight rockets are hitting Kiev and other Ukrainian cities again, tonight the world fears again for Volodymyr Zelensky and all the brave Ukrainians who put their lives in the way of the autocracy. For democracy, for freedom - and for a global spring.