18 days of the 21st century

Has it taken more than 20 years to start the 21st century?

It was the historian Eric Hobsbawm who identified the end of the 20th century in 1989 with the disappearance of the USSR and the global order born after the greatest massacre in history in World War II.

For 18 days, the 21st century has been undergoing a geopolitical and geostrategic restructuring that is unmatched in the last 30 years in Europe.

Putin's war of conquest over Ukraine with troops, artillery, aviation and missiles has shattered the apparently stable balance that was born with the fall of the Wall and his diagnoses loaded with triumphalism about the beginning of a new time: the so-called end seemed to begin then of history

The dismemberment of the Soviet Union opened a new era and swept its historic rival from the West's geopolitical agenda.

Today Putin's imperialist warmongering has blown everything up and each geopolitical subject has changed its objectives in two weeks.

The tragedy in Ukraine has prompted a barely imaginable reaction in the EU under the pattern of Europe as a peaceful seaside resort.

For the first time, Europe chastened by the 1939-1945 war has agreed to provide 1,000 million euros in military aid for the defense of a State that does not belong to the EU or NATO, but is perceived by citizens as European territory and last frontier with the aggressor.

The scenes that fill the screens of the entire world refer to an experience of terror that only a tiny percentage of Europeans can now remember in the first person.

Europe has lived more than 80 years without a war that explicitly affected its way of life or endangered the civil and political order born in 1945. The war in Yugoslavia was fought in Europe, but that catastrophe arose from internal causes and was the result immediate breakup of countries under Soviet control.

Today Ukraine is something else: it suddenly reveals, with the brutal immediacy of social networks, the consubstantial fragility of the European democratic order as a potential target of Russian missiles and its nuclear weapons.

Nobody knows today the final claim of Putin in his invasion of Ukraine.

The discretionary destruction of his cities, the siege of the capital,

the control of the Donbas area after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 call into question not only the borders of the Europe born after the Soviet implosion of 1989. They also call into question both the European capacity to maintain peace and the role that the two world powers in contention for the future, the United States and China.

China maintains a position similar to Russia, despite the abstention in condemning the invasion in the UN Assembly, and at the same time offers itself as an interested mediator of a possible truce, with still unknown strategic implications.

The United States acts jointly with Europe, but the consequences of the war are not comparable on both sides of the Atlantic, neither due to geographical proximity, nor due to dependency or historical relationship with Russia.

Whether or not Putin manages to carry the conquest of Ukraine to the end, the future will continue to be a threatening unknown and a new era will have begun as it usually begins: with a war that changes the order of the world and reinstates the awareness of militarized polarity in European citizenship.

That map had been missing from the continent for 30 years and in two weeks it's back.

Putin ordered the attack on Ukraine when a jubilant Europe was preparing to experience the

of the 21st century with an economic aid package of historic magnitude.

It was intended both to alleviate the harsh wounds of the covid pandemic and to reinforce the global geopolitical role of a faded and invisible protagonist.

The 750,000 million euros of the EU's Next Generation funds should also serve to defuse the contagion of ultranational-populism sponsored by Putin in multiple European countries.

Today they will serve to pay the bill for the war that Putin started on February 24.

In the 18 days since then, another 21st century has begun.