Europe’s security crisis is the result of strategic hesitation, institutional decay, and the normalization of corruption.
The West did not stumble into its current confrontation with Russia by accident. Nor was it the result of a failure to understand Vladimir Putin’s intentions. Those intentions were visible at least since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea in open violation of international law. What followed was not miscalculation, but choice.
Western governments opted for restraint over deterrence, sanctions over enforcement, and diplomacy over confrontation. These decisions were justified as efforts to preserve stability. In reality, they preserved escalation.
Authoritarian regimes do not interpret restraint as responsibility. They interpret it as opportunity.
The war in Ukraine is therefore not an aberration but a culmination. Crimea was a test of Western resolve. The response was measured, cautious, and ultimately ineffective. That response shaped the strategic environment in which today’s war became possible.
Yet the most consequential failures were not military. They were institutional.
As Garry Kasparov has long argued, Putin’s system depends less on ideology than on corruption. Repression maintains control at home, but corruption projects influence abroad. War, in this framework, is not a breakdown of the system — it is its sustaining mechanism.
Instead of consolidating democratic norms after the Cold War, Western societies allowed Russian capital and political influence to embed themselves within their institutions. Politicians became financially compromised. Political movements across the ideological spectrum accepted opaque funding. Corporate interests created structural dependencies, particularly in energy markets. Regulatory and judicial oversight weakened under economic and political pressure.
These developments did not occur in a vacuum. They were enabled by the belief that economic integration would moderate authoritarian behavior. That assumption proved false.
Economic interdependence did not restrain Russia. It constrained the West.
The information domain became another critical vulnerability. In democratic systems, media pluralism is a strength — but only when independence is preserved. When ownership structures and financial dependencies align media ecosystems with authoritarian interests, public discourse erodes.
The result is not overt propaganda, but something more subtle and corrosive: moral equivalence, narrative relativism, and public fatigue. Aggression is reframed as “security concerns.” Accountability dissolves into ambiguity. Democratic societies lose the clarity required to respond decisively.
This erosion of institutional confidence has strategic consequences. Deterrence depends not only on military capacity, but on political coherence and public trust. When democracies appear divided, compromised, or uncertain of their own values, deterrence collapses.
Europe now faces a narrow window of choice. The question is no longer whether Russia poses a threat to European security. That is settled. The question is whether Western democracies are prepared to confront the internal vulnerabilities that made that threat manageable for Moscow.
Addressing these vulnerabilities will require more than military spending. It will require confronting entrenched economic interests, restoring regulatory credibility, insulating political systems from foreign influence, and defending media independence. These steps will impose real costs.
But the alternative is more expensive.
History offers a consistent lesson: democracies that delay institutional self-defense eventually face external confrontation under far worse conditions. The warnings now coming from European and NATO leaders should not be understood as predictions of the future. They are acknowledgments of past failure.
The West did not misread Putin. It enabled him. The remaining question is whether it is prepared to correct that error — before the price rises further.