Moscow’s dream of return collides with changed South Caucasus

For four years, the war in Ukraine has ground on, steadily burying the early bravado that it would be over in days. That claim, authored in Moscow, now reads like a dispatch from a vanished world. Wars rarely distribute gains neatly, but this one has inflicted on Russia a wound that is proving stubbornly incurable: the erosion of hegemony. Power, once lost in public, is hard to reclaim in private.