“Russian power has always been built on the foundation of demography,” says Paul Morland in UnHerd. At the beginning of the 20th century, the country’s population was 136 million – and booming. The German historian Friedrich Meinecke fretted over the “almost inexhaustible fertility” of the Slavs, and in the Second World War it was “the endlessness of Russian manpower” that eventually ground down the Nazi army. “We confronted a hydra,” said the German Field Marshall Erich von Manstein. “For every head cut off, two new ones appeared to grow.”

Plenty of people now talk about the “supposed naivety” of globalisation, says Rainer Hank in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. They say the war in Ukraine has shown the dangers of “making the global economy too closely intertwined” – Germany’s dependence on Russian gas and oil, for example, limits how we can sanction Vladimir Putin. This ignores the upside: these networks of trade mean we can react to Putin’s “barbarism” with an “economic war” that properly punishes him, and yet doesn’t escalate the military situation. We could never have done this with the Soviet Union, which was “hardly integrated” into the world economy to begin with.