So once again Europe is witness to tanks rolling across frontiers, bombs and missiles falling on cities, and civilians huddled in bomb shelters, praying in the streets or caught in terrified paralysis in sprawling traffic jams as they try to escape to a country not under attack.
Once more military casualties are counted in the hundreds in a couple of hours.
In Kyiv, a major European capital, people took refuge from bombs and missiles in the subway system, like scenes we all know from films of London in the World War II blitz.
And yet Europe had said – after that conflagration – never again.
Vladimir Putin has demonstrated absolute contempt for global opinion, especially Western opinion.
The only international view he has expressed any concern about is the Chinese view. And there have been no vetoes from Beijing.
Time and again Putin said he had no intention of invading Ukraine, and yet on Thursday Russian troops poured into Ukraine from the north, the east and the south.
If anything, the first round of Western sanctions were so pitiful they would have encouraged maximum Russian aggression.
This is a colossal failure for Europe, for NATO, for the West, and a terrible tragedy for the innocent people of Ukraine.
Russia under Putin has been annexing territory, intimidating neighbours, murdering Russian dissidents in west European cities and launching cyber attacks for years, and only now, just now, is Europe thinking of doing something.
Some of the west European leaders have even canvassed the radical possibility of marginally raising their respective defence budgets.
But don’t worry, nothing will be done in a hurry.
The speed of the Russian blitzkrieg raises all manner of impossible questions.
If Putin’s invasion is successful quickly, what is the guarantee that he stops at Ukraine’s borders, with Poland and with other European nations once part of the communist bloc?
Some of these nations are NATO members. Up until now, the NATO security guarantee has stopped Putin from taking major military action against NATO members.
How weak, now, does Putin believe the West is? What is the extent of the gambles he might take?
The debacle of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan has encouraged the Russians and the Chinese to believe the US is weak.
But in saying the US is weak, we are not ourselves strong. The Americans are infinitely stronger than us. Like the west Europeans, we make no serious effort to be able to defend ourselves.
We are great at Churchillian rhetoric, great at 20-year plans, but very, very bad at actually delivering any defence capability.
That is the state of almost all US allies. So if the West fails, don’t blame the US.
As the Ukrainian President argues, the West has been appeasing Putin for 15 years.
The Europeans are always threatening that the next bad thing Putin does will see them respond with really tough actions. No, really, seriously this time, really tough actions.
The West has the power to crush the Russian economy – not by ridiculous, meaningless bans on individual oligarchs or trade with territories which do no trade anyway – but by cutting off its fossil fuel income, or its ability to trade in the dollar system, or to use the international Swift payments system.
But all of that would actually cost the West itself.
So far it looks as though Europe, and America, don’t even want to pay the higher energy prices that are an inevitable consequence of serious sanctions against Russia.
America is bolstering its NATO allies, for the truth is that the European democracies, exactly like Australia, are pathetic in their defence capabilities, against a serious power like Russia, without the Americans.
US military power in Europe means tanks and heavy armoured vehicles.
Yet already the US is falling behind in the Pacific where it needs ships and subs and maritime drones and lots and lots of missiles.
In the short term, there is a clear military trade-off between US power in the Pacific and US power in Europe.
The common denominator is that US allies, the Europeans and Australia as well, are derelict in their own efforts.
The variables, however, are still many and unpredictable. How effective is the Ukrainian military? How significant will Western sanctions actually be? What is the limit of Moscow’s strategic ambition? What are the calculations in Beijing?
We’ll know the answers soon enough.
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