A little more than a month ago, in mid-April, I came across an article on the website of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) titled “War of Unreality” that struck a deep, personal nerve. The piece, authored by ECFR Fellow Gustav Gressel, was written as both an observation and a warning. The observation was that Russia was engaged in creating an “alternate reality” – constantly positing a narrative of current events that flatly contradicted the way that the West (read the global community of democracies) thought about the world. The warning was that Russia’s attempts at ontological contrariness would sooner or later have dire consequences.