Dreams can sometimes die even before dawn.
On the night of February 23-24 a year ago, when the world learned that yes, Vladimir Putin's Russia had indeed unleashed a large-scale old-fashioned invasion of Ukraine, what was left of the dream died - or of the mirage - of the singers of the end of history.
Since then, 12 months of death, destruction, atrocities and escalations have passed;
and of that war - renamed in principle "special military operation" in the Kremlin's Orwellian newspeak - there is no end in sight.
If not in the perspective (or ambitions) of some unconditional surrender of the enemy front that no one, strictly speaking factual logic and wishes aside,
Something that the mainstream collective imagination of the West had buried among the vague memories of the nightmares of the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century at least starting from the season sealed by the proclamations of victory for the epilogue of the Cold War in the shadow of the lower the Soviet flag.
Epilogue mistaken by many for a real military victory, claimed as the claim of something definitive.
But in reality never consolidated into anything shared between the declared winners and the presumed losers.
And ultimately a harbinger of dangerous misunderstandings.
In a context of very different feelings between the West and the East of the world (understood as both geographical and cultural or mentality spaces) regarding the projects of a "new democratic world order":
evoked by some with the simplifications of a bold self-satisfaction;
from the others between recriminations, frustration, authoritarian regressions, suspicions with obsessive traits.
A panorama whose waste remains today, watered by the blood of the battlefields of Ukraine in a panorama that makes even the very fresh nightmares of the epochal global pandemic from Covid fade into the background.
And the rubble of too many illusions.
In the West, the illusions fueled by the belief that the Cold War could once again be archived as a "war to end all wars", according to the ominous Wilsonian rhetoric (taken up by HG Wells and a tragic deception of the First World War): "a war to put an end to all wars" destined to give birth as if by fate to peace under the dictates of liberal democracy.
In the East those of those who, like Putin, worn out by almost 25 years of autocratic power, have finally bet everything on an alleged right to settle geopolitical accounts at the cost of challenging the principles of international law to the core;
perhaps clinging to the wishful thinking of being able to implode the internal contradictions of a US-Europe axis which for now, if anything, has become compacted.
In any case, history seems to have turned a new page.
And only time will tell whether towards something less worse than today's sinister scenarios after a long interlude of violence, or towards a terrifying black hole.
In the meantime, the Ukrainians continue to pay the highest price: protagonists within their borders of a courageous resistance in recent months, exceeding the expectations of Moscow and beyond;
but at the same time pawns in a chess game (if not yet in a direct confrontation) that dominates them in a global dimension.
The summary of this year 1 is a plot of tears and blood, of bombings and mobilisations, of denunciations of heinous war crimes and inevitable propaganda bulletins in a context of war in which - as is well known - the first victim is always the truth: ground by the propaganda machine of the aggressors, and sometimes even by the attacked, amid disinformation, survival instinct, pressure on the internal trenches, attempts at cross-conditioning with friendly countries.
A plot designed in the first weeks by the risk of an invasion on several fronts;
then by the Russian advance stopped at the gates of Kiev (and tainted right away, failure or diversion, by brutal acts of ferocity such as in Bucha);
from the taking of Mariupol amidst the ravages of Azovstal;
from the surprising Ukrainian counter-offensive in Kherson;
by General Surovikin's missile escalation on strategic infrastructures, including civilian ones;
from the parallel escalation of military aid from the NATO allies to the forces of President Volodymyr Zelensky;
and from the transition from a military strategy partly of maneuver to an inexorable war of attrition (in Moscow's intention) as it was 80 or 100 years ago.
Against the backdrop of an increase in the stakes for the players in the field up to the very survival of leadership, territories and states that threatens the margins of any future compromise.
While the "third world war in pieces" evoked at the time by Pope Francis seems to transform itself into the prophecy of a frightening mosaic in the process of composition, cradled by remnants of comic narrative which - from politics, to the media, in droves of unsuspecting customers of the sports bar of social networks - sometimes they seem to break the boundaries of every taboo.
So much so as to induce the scientists of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, custodians of a certain idea of disarmament and pacifism increasingly out of fashion, to move the hands of their Armageddon clock (the Doomsday Clock) from 100 to 90 seconds "to midnight" : never so close, from 1947 onwards, to the dark X hour of a potential holocaust of humanity.