Darfur. Iraq. Iran. Yemen. Georgia. Nigeria. Lybia. Syria. And the list goes on and on for wars that began from merely 2003 onwards.
But to see tanks and fights and bombs in the heart of Europe?
William Faulkner said it best in Requiem for a Nun:
The past is never dead. In fact, it’s not even past.
And this resonates profoundly with a quote from Svetlana Aleksievich’s book The Unwomanly Face of War that described how a Soviet woman soldier during WWII felt decades after the war:
what wounds us the most is that we have been driven from a great past into an unbearable small present.
Conflict is anywhere and anytime. It never stopped. It never will. War will find a way to come along.