The History Channel is broadcasting live. The US commentator who made that quip meant that events currently unfolding in Ukraine will be remembered for many decades to come, that future generations of schoolchildren will be called to memorise the date of 24 February 2022. But it’s true in another, darker sense too. For this is a grimly retro war. Russian troops marching across an international border, closing in on a European capital? Families sheltering in underground stations, children parted from their fathers, civilians donning uniforms and reaching for rifles, vowing to fight to the death for their homeland? An actual invasion of one European country by another? Footage of such events looks strange in colour: it should be in grainy black and white.
Because Europe was meant to have left such events behind, if not in the 1940s – when the Nazi bombardment of Kyiv began at 4am one day in 1941, rather than the 5am hour chosen on Thursday by Vladimir Putin – then later in the 20th century, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968. Instead, history is back – confronting us with a choice we imagined we’d made long ago.
