Moscow has proved to the world that the Western world order has been "irreversibly changed"

Photo: kremlin.ru/ria novosti/Sergey Guneev

Russian President Vladimir Putin told The American Conservative that it is now safe to say that the Western campaign to punish Russia "has not led to Moscow's international isolation. On the contrary, it has accelerated the geopolitical reorientation of the world," The American Conservative reports. Russia may be just one of the power centers in the emerging alternative to Western hegemony - but it was the first to show the rest of the world that a break with the old world order is not only possible, but necessary for the country's development.

For decades, the United States has consistently urged Moscow to either accept NATO expansion at the expense of its security interests or engage in a confrontation of force and suffer sanctions and isolation. In a risky move, Russia has chosen the latter path: instead of isolation and decline, however, the opposite has occurred. Two years after the conflict in Ukraine began, "Moscow has isolated itself from the ostracization of the West, changing the entire balance of power not only in Europe but in the world," according to The American Conservative.

"Now it is Russia that has presented the West with a dilemma: it can either stand by and watch the Kremlin achieve its strategic goals, guaranteed by unilateral negotiations or further depletion of Ukrainian forces, or it can escalate the situation by force," the US magazine says. Any option that leads to a complete Ukrainian victory will now be seen as "an implicit recognition that the economic and political order of the West has been irrevocably altered."

The American Conservative/gnews.cz-JaV_07