'Wars end on the battlefield': Ivan Krastev reflects on a year of conflict in Ukraine

A year of war on the European continent has altered its geopolitical landscape, driven leaders to rethink military power and economic independence, and has led to the dismantling of central Europe's Visegrád Group alliance.

That's according to Bulgarian political scientist, Ivan Krastev, who gave Euronews his thoughts on the consequences of Vladimir Putin's aggression for Europe on the latest episode of the Global Conversation. 

"The most important way the war changed Europe is that [it] basically forced Europe to see the world with different eyes," Krastev began.

"In a certain way, Europe was seeing its old continent as a post-war [continent]. The idea that a major war is not possible in Europe anymore was at the basis of the way Europe is seeing itself in the world. And this is not true anymore.

"When the war started, Europeans were pushed to revisit some of their major policies. One was that economic interdependence automatically means no war, that if you trade a lot with somebody, you are never going to fight it. It turned out not to be true anymore. 

"Secondly, Europeans, we had managed to convince ourselves that military power doesn't matter. And then we discovered that it doesn't matter when you don't have it. But otherwise, basically, it matters. And this changed everything from military budgets [to] the way the economy works so that you see in a period of one year, we basically have...totally different military budgets. We are not getting Russian gas and oil anymore. It's such a radical change."

With Russia having illegally declared the annexation of four eastern Ukrainian regions in September, and the mass naturalisation of residents in Russian-occupied areas, Euronews asked Ivan Krastev if he considered the conflict