Chrystia Freeland is the federal member of parliament for Toronto Centre and the author of Plutocrats: the Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.

The war between Russia and Ukraine erupted so unexpectedly and escalated so quickly that it is tempting to think the motivations of the combatants are complicated or obscure. In fact, this is a fight over something very simple: the geopolitical rules that govern the Eurasian continent nearly a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But here is the genuinely complicated part: Vladimir Putin is seeking to rewrite those rules himself, and we don’t know what the Russian president believes the new rules should be. For the moment, we appear to be in a kind of shaky equipoise, with a ceasefire in place. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian parliament voted to strengthen the country’s ties to the European Union—eventually—while at the same time granting provisional concessions to the Putin-backed separatists in the east. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is visiting Washington this week to seek more economic and military aid.


So this is a good time to ask: Do Putin’s new rules for Europe mean that he intends to stop at Ukraine—in which case this war may be containable? Or do they mean that he moves on to “enfranchising” Russian-speaking populations elsewhere in the former Soviet sphere—in which case we may be looking at horrors unthinkable only a year ago? The coming months could well be decisive in determining what conclusions Putin comes to—and what this post-post-Cold War order looks like.

On Thursday, Poroshenko will visit a White House that, with other major crises erupting, is ardently wishing that this existential question for Europe has been dodged. There is reason to imagine that it might be. When Russia openly invaded eastern Ukraine last month, after a summer when Ukrainian forces had been making steady progress against Russian-led and armed insurgents, the Western reaction was lukewarm. Knowing they were on their own against a nuclear-armed neighbor who boasted he could reach Kyiv in two weeks, the Ukrainians compromised.

Now Poroshenko and the Ukrainian parliament have granted three years of special status to the separatists and delayed implementation of part of the trade deal with Europe that was the original pretext for the conflict. Ukrainians are hoping these concessions will be enough to keep Russia at bay—and so are the Western leaders who have no stomach for a fight, and no budget for one, either.

But we need to be careful not to confuse what we want with what we have. If Poroshenko’s wager pays out, we will be tempted to forget about Ukraine, as we forgot about Georgia after the hot summer of 2008. That would be a mistake. Putin won’t forget. And even if this compromise holds, his actions have shattered the European security order.

With the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine, Putin has unilaterally declared himself to be above the rules of the post-1991 international system. He hasn’t yet told us what new rules he considers himself bound by. The post-Soviet peace is over: Whatever happens next week, next month or next year in the Donbass—the densely populated area of eastern Ukraine that Putin is seeking to dominate—this fundamental question will remain open.

Putin is discovering his limits, and determining Europe’s new de facto laws, by surprise, and by force—first in Georgia in 2008, and now, even more starkly, in Ukraine. When the next, inevitable challenge comes, we need to be ready.

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Before the current crisis, the rules governing Europe had seemed fairly straightforward: Since the 1977 Helsinki Accords, Europeans and North Americans have agreed that Europe’s national borders were inviolable, and could not be changed by foreign intervention. That agreement was updated by the Paris Charter of 1990, and then by the 1991 Belovezhsky Accord, the three-way deal between Russia, Ukraine and Belarus that dissolved the Soviet Union.

Based on these pacts, Ukrainians had thought that the countries that emerged from the disintegration of the USSR were sovereign states, free to sign their own trade deals with other countries. They also believed it was up to each country to resolve its own domestic political dramas and to stumble, whether towards democracy or dictatorship, as local conditions allowed (though the post-Soviet states were always wary of how Moscow might react).. Before March, that is probably what the rest of the world thought, too. Putin imposed an increasingly severe authoritarian regime in Russia, and killed tens of thousands of Chechens, but Russia remained a member of the G-8 in good standing and host of the Sochi Olympics, because it was a sovereign state, acting within its own borders.

The Baltic republics joined NATO and the European Union, but remained at peace and continued to do business with Russia, because they, too, were sovereign states, making their own choices. It is almost difficult to remember that as recently as January, the biggest issue between Putin and the West was over his attitude toward homosexuality.

With his annexation and invasion of Crimea, Putin overturned that status quo. In response to Ukraine’s democratic uprising and its consequent refusal to join his Eurasian economic union, the Russian leader claimed part of Ukrainian territory. His casus belli was simple—Ukraine wanted to choose its own form of government and economic partners; Putin disagreed; the result was war.

The genuinely complicated part is figuring out whether Putin will decide he has a casus belli elsewhere, or whether the new rules he is writing in his head can be implemented without bloodshed.

Ukraine is a boisterous, wired democracy and that makes its position easy to read. To the world’s surprise, and to their own, Ukrainians in February showed they were willing to fight and to die for democracy within their own country. When Russia invaded Crimea, the West strongly urged Kyiv to be restrained in its response. That didn’t work out so well.

When Russia tried to re-run the Crimean hybrid war playbook in the Donbass, Ukrainians—again to the world’s surprise and perhaps their own—proved willing to fight and to die for their national sovereignty. Russia’s open invasion in August further unified the country and strengthened its resolve.

Ukraine’s consolidation and determination was evident in the election in May of Poroshenko, an early backer of the Maidan revolution that touched off all these events, with nationwide support and on the first ballot, out of a field of 17. It has been evident in the number of volunteers fighting in the east and in the national donations to support that battle. And it is apparent in the polls ahead of the October parliamentary elections, which show strong support for pro-Western parties. Poroshenko’s compromise with the Kremlin, which seems so prudent to the West, makes him a dove in Ukraine and puts his party at some political risk.

Sadly for Ukraine, what is also apparent is the country’s limited military capacity. Ukraine is broke. It will struggle to keep itself warm this winter. Its machinery of state had rotted and is only slowly being rebuilt. The Maidan revolution and the Ukrainian military’s success against the Russian-led and -armed insurgents in the Donbass this summer show that it would be unwise to underestimate the willingness of individual Ukrainians to fight for democracy and sovereignty.

This is a country that would be hard to pacify.

But the weakness of the Ukrainian state, and the muscle of the Russian military, means that Putin’s recent assertion that he could be in Kyiv in two weeks and no one should toy with “one of the most powerful nuclear nations” is no idle boast. That’s why Poroshenko did a deal. And it is why understanding what Russia’s next move will be is so important—and that’s where things get so difficult.

We know what Putin’s initial aim was: a Ukraine that was a twin of Kazakhstan or Belarus, states that are sovereign but also politically subordinate to Russia and authoritarian at home.

But after the Kremlin’s chief ally in Ukraine, former President Victor Yanukovych, signally failed to build that sort of regime, and now that Russia has secured a three-year special status deal for the insurgents it sponsored in the Donbass, we are waiting to hear what Putin believes his limits to be and what parts of the world he believes Moscow should control, or what form that suzerainty should take. When Putin speaks of “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia”—a shifting territory in the south and east of Ukraine—is his ultimate goal an annexation, à la Crimea, or a Transnistria (a small region that proclaimed independence from Moldova in 1990) or a puppet state like South Ossetia, carved out of Georgia in 2008?

When Putin talks about defending the rights of ethnic Russians and of Russian speakers, how much of Ukraine, where everyone is bilingual, does he have in mind? Could his definition stretch to “Left-Bank Ukraine,” the territory that was part of Imperial Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries and includes much of Kyiv and of the territory on the east bank of the Dniepr River. Perhaps he means all of Ukraine apart from the three western provinces of Galicia, which were ruled by Poland until the Second World War and are the country’s Piedmont?

Ukraine is just the beginning, of course. All of Belarus speaks Russian and the distinction between Belorussians and Russians is blurrier than that between Ukrainians and Russians. Nearly a third of Kazakhstan’s people are ethnic Russians who have resented what they see as the imposition of the Kazakh language since the collapse of the Soviet Union and who mostly live in the northern steppes that border Russia. Putin’s actions in Ukraine have raised fresh questions about these people and these lands, which is why the leaders of these two countries, formerly Russia’s staunchest allies, have begun to signal their doubts about his Ukrainian adventure.

The Baltic states are members of the EU and of NATO. But they are also homes to large ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking minorities. And, like Ukraine, they have a partial history of Imperial Russian rule. In Putin’s eyes, does that also make them fair game for Russian meddling? Despite the firm line drawn by Obama in his speech in Estonia – invoking the pledge that an attack on any NATO member is an attack on all – Putin, the wily old KGB colonel, has shown that he possesses other means than direct invasion to make his influence felt. Already Russian officials are warning of “discrimination” in other former Soviet Bloc countries against Russian-speaking minorities.

The point of raising all of these grim possibilities is that no one, including Putin himself, today knows how far the Kremlin writ runs. We can’t let the quasi-peace in the Donbass, where a few people are still dying every few days, obscure that unpleasant new reality. Today, Ukraine is on the front lines of Russia’s challenge to the post-Soviet world order. But this is a contest that is just beginning, not ending, and one that concerns us all.