The prospect of Donald Trump remaining in a position to decide US foreign policy for the next 2¼ years is daunting. For Europe, the stakes have not been as high since 1939. At the heart of our collective prospects lies the conflict in Ukraine. Sometimes its strategic importance is lost in the chatter of pundits.

If Russia succeeds in subjugating Ukraine and extends its reach as far as Odesa – reducing the remains of Ukraine to a landlocked political dependency similar to Belarus – the next target for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s imperial restoration may be Moldova, where Putin already has a potential foothold in the so-called Trans-Dnistrian republic. This would leave Putin’s Russia effectively abutting the Balkan states. If that were to happen, plans to admit the remaining western Balkan states to EU membership would have to be abandoned. Russia would be in a position to establish energy dependency across southeastern Europe.

Some might ask, with justification, whether the EU’s current openness to expand into the Balkans was ever realistic. Whatever chance there might have been of pursuing both Balkan expansion and EU integration, hard questions were never answered. Perhaps they cannot be answered.

Did the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica and the Kosovo conflict not tell us something about the linguistic, religious and historical gulf that........

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