By Damon Linker, The Week

How fast have events been moving over the past several days? So fast that my initial take on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, written Thursday morning, just hours after the war began, is already irrelevant.

Then, I mainly expressed sadness at what I expected to be Ukraine’s swift and decisive defeat at the hands of Russia’s vastly more powerful military machine. Instead, that machine has sputtered, and Ukraine’s unexpected resolve has inspired what can only be described as geopolitical earthquakes.

Germany’s government has sharply hiked spending on defense, breaking from decades of precedent. The European Union has shut down its airspace to commercial and private Russian airplanes and committed, along with several member countries (including non-NATO Sweden and Finland), to arming Ukraine. And perhaps most astonishing of all, Europe and the United States (joined even by perennially neutral Switzerland) have put together a package of economic sanctions far more severe than anything anticipated prior to the outbreak of hostilities. There’s now a very real possibility Russia could be plunged into a catastrophic economic tailspin.

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