This is a good article that defies Betteridge’s law (“any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no”). The answer to this one is a clear and resounding “yes”.

Well, with a caveat that “permanent” is a really long time, but within the foreseeable future, 20-30 years, the break with the West is almost certainly going to remain deeper and wider than anything remembered even during Cold War.

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Will Russia’s Break With the West Be Permanent?

By Michael Kimmage and Maria Lipman

No matter how long the war continues, and regardless of how it ends, it will almost certainly leave in place a crucial new reality of twenty-first-century international relations. Russia will be absent from the West and the West absent from Russia, an abyss of hostility between them.

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• The tremor of conflict in 2014 turned into an earthquake as far as Russia and the West were concerned. The Kremlin now presents itself as at war with the “collective West,” and in support of Ukraine, the West is eager to isolate Russia as much as it can.

• [The] transformation is Russia’s departure from the West—a shift even more all-encompassing than was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. One half of this story is Russia’s separation from Europe and the United States and its loss of contact with people, governments, institutions, and companies in the West. The other half is the newly anti-Western tenor of Russian life, a trend that is both spontaneous and government mandated. The speed with which these changes have taken place is unprecedented in Russian history.

• The forces driving this break will be immensely difficult for any Putin successor to reverse, assuming that a leader who is not expressly anti-Western can still come to power in Russia. For decades, conflict between Russia and the West may be an entrenched aspect of the international order.

• Since Peter the Great Russia’s focus has been the rest of Europe and the West, politically, militarily, culturally and ideologically. This is now changing.

• Nearly sixteen months into the war, ordinary Russians harbor substantial and most likely enduring anger and resentment toward the West. In the later decades of the Soviet Union, the government largely failed to convince Soviet citizens of an implacably hostile West… In today’s Russia, there is no longer any counterbalancing force to anti-Western hostility.

• Russia’s decoupling from the West is more than a harried response to sanctions. And it is not exactly a turn to autarky. Since the start of the war, Moscow has developed—not diminished—its relations with the outside world.

• The weak link in Putin’s project of uprooting Russia from the West is neither economic nor military. The current sanctions regime notwithstanding, the Kremlin will find ways to continue the war. The more embedded Russia becomes in non-Western economic structures, the more its military will be able to carry on. The weak link for Putin is cultural.

• For 300 years, Russia’s emulation of and immersion in Western culture has been integral to its own evolution: China and the so-called global South cannot replace Europe as a model for Russia’s culture.

• In addition to aiming for Russia’s “strategic defeat” in Ukraine, Western leaders and policymakers embraced the unspoken end goal of either eliminating Russia from Europe or making Russia’s presence in Europe as small as possible.

• The breakup between Russia and the West has acquired an aura of permanence. For Putin’s Russia to rethink its ties to the West, the West would have to withdraw its military support for Ukraine and agree to a neutral Ukraine or a divided Ukraine in which Russia has dominion over at least half of the country. This is highly unlikely to happen.

• For the West to rethink its ties to Russia, Russia would have to end the war, participate in the war crimes trials of Russians, turn Putin over to The Hague, and pay war reparations to Ukraine. This, too, is highly unlikely.

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Michael Kimmage is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio.

Maria Lipman is Senior Visiting Fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and Co-Editor of the institute’s Russia.Post.