Over and over again — throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels — I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets. I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next.September 1939 brought invasion from both east and west, occupation, chaos, destruction, genocide. Most of the people who attended that June wedding were soon dead or in exile. None of them ever returned to the house.

In retrospect, all of them now look naive. Instead of celebrating weddings, they should have dropped everything, mobilized, prepared for total war while it was still possible. And now I have to ask: Should Ukrainians, in the summer of 2014, do the same? Should central Europeans join them?

I realize that this question sounds hysterical, and foolishly apocalyptic, to U.S. or Western European readers. But hear me out, if only because this is a conversation many people in the eastern half of Europe are having right now. In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine. The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great. Various maps of Novorossiya are said to be circulating in Moscow. Some include Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, cities that are still hundreds of miles away from the fighting. Some place Novorossiya along the coast, so that it connects Russia to Crimea and eventually to Transnistria, the Russian-occupied province of Moldova. Even if it starts out as an unrecognized rump state — Abkhazia and South Ossetia, “states” that Russia carved out of Georgia, are the models here — Novorossiya can grow larger over time.

David Fuller's view

There you have it.  Putin’s ambition is to create New Russia (Novorossiya).  He is gambling that the West will do little to stop him, beyond some sanctions to which he has responded in kind.  In this deadly game of high stakes poker, Putin has just upped the ante once again.  Eastern European countries are seriously worried, and understandably so.  In reality, the West has the stronger hand, but does it have the resolve?  We may be about to find out.

This is obviously a worrying subject but I hope subscribers read the rest of Anne Applebaum’s column, for the insights that it provides.

Stock markets are clearly not discounting the potential risks, partly because Putin is blaming Ukraine, while covertly preparing to seize what he wants.  There is also an understandable element of disbelief, which may not be justified. 

Precious metals are not yet viewed as a prudent hedge. 

Meanwhile, some of the most interested observers are China’s rulers.