Hello from London,

Do you remember where were you on February 24th last year? When, early on a gloomy, grey morning, Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, it was evident that history was being rewritten. What you are doing, however mundane, on first hearing news of such epochal events often sticks in the mind.

In London, it was a Thursday and like many of my colleagues I was busy putting the final touches to that week’s print edition of The Economist. Articles in almost every section needed revising and updating to take account of the new world disorder. The cover leader that appeared that week stands the test of time. But the question we put on the cover betrays how much the war that followed has defied expectations. “Where will he stop?” we asked of Mr Putin, hinting at the sense in many quarters that the invasion would be swift, successful and brutal. 

In fact, as some maps we published on Friday show, Russia’s advance into Ukraine soon stalled, and has since been partially reversed. The dogged, pragmatic heroism of Ukraine’s soldiers and citizens and of their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has turned what Mr Putin must have hoped would be a repeat of the rapid annexation of Crimea in 2014 into a long war of attrition with no swift end in sight. In the process Ukraine itself has been transformed into a more unified, more Westward-leaning, more resilient democracy.

So the questions for now are no longer “Where will he stop?” but rather “When and how can he be beaten?” This week we will be publishing a series of in-depth articles on “a year of war” that explain how expectations have been so transformed, but also how what is at stake in the war has only grown in importance. As the first in the series argues, Ukraine’s fate will become a measure of the West’s self-belief and stature, and its ability to retain unity in the face of Mr Putin’s threats, blandishments and endless divide-and-rule chicanery. And to a certain extent, it will test the West’s industrial capacity, too, as it struggles to produce enough weaponry and ammunition to allow Ukraine to defend itself.

The global economy is still grappling with the effects of the war, with the West still trying to tamp down inflation as interest rates continue to climb. The rising costs of finance, energy and food have pushed some countries to the edge of bankruptcy. This will be in the news this week as finance ministers from members of the G20 gather in India, with the plight of heavily indebted countries high on the agenda. On this issue, as on so much else, America and China find themselves pulling in opposite directions. China is refusing to play by the old rules of international financial diplomacy. Sri Lanka, in urgent need of a bail-out, and deeply in hock to China, may test the willingness of the West and the IMF to go it alone—ie, to provide the money and restructure the debt without China’s taking part in the process.