The Observer view on the year ahead for Europe | Observer editorial

From France to Ukraine, the continent faces many challenges during 2022

The recent barrage of threats from Vladimir Putin is no longer solely to do with Ukraine. Russia's president has steadily broadened the scope of his demands to encompass defence and security arrangements in Europe as a whole. Even if current tensions on Ukraine's borders do not ultimately result in open conflict, this deliberate escalation bodes ill for 2022.

What Putin wants, in effect, is to turn the clock back to the 1990s, before former Warsaw Pact countries such as Poland and ex-Soviet republics such as Estonia joined Nato. If he had his way, he would probably reconstitute the Soviet Union, whose demise he mourns. This bitter old KGB spy never accepted cold war defeat.

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