After a period of relative peace, war returned to Europe when the Russian blitzkrieg rolled into Ukraine a year ago yesterday, the lessons of 1939-1945 tossed onto a bonfire of nationalism, hubris and madness by those whose earlier generations perhaps experienced the most horrors of World War II.

In a rambling speech announcing what he called the “special military operation” against the old ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin evoked the Stalingrad spirit, saying his goal was to “deNazify” Ukraine, which he claimed posed a mortal threat to Russia. The next day, the Herald editorial noted even George Orwell could not have made it up: “In reality, Putin wants to depose Ukraine’s democratically elected Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky.” The editorial predicted the invasion was not only a global event but that it would take years to play out.

The day after Putin sent Russian troops in, our editorial said a full-blown invasion offers Putin the opportunity to expand Russia’s territory in the region, rewrite the security map of Europe, increase its influence globally and to prove that, in a battle of wills with the West, Russian aggression will win out. Having stewed for more than three decades over the humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, this is the Russian leader’s most audacious and bloody effort to reassert the nation’s authority as a global power to be reckoned with.

Putin’s brutal assault on a sovereign nation has produced no victory yet, but it has raised the spectre of global war as the world struggles under the combined effects of climate change, COVID-19 and economic uncertainty.

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For years, the conflict had been a sideshow as Russia strove to establish the old hegemony through separatist insurgents. In July 2014, it came home to Australians when a Russian-supplied missile in separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine brought down a Malaysia Airlines flight, killing all on board, including 27 Australians.

A year along, the Ukraine conflict drags on, a slow grind rather than a stalemate, with no sign of war fatigue. Against enormous odds, plucky Ukraine stymied the invader but come the European summer, the Russian juggernaut is expected to roll again across the steppes.

A year ago, the world waited for Ukraine to fall. The Russian military machine was, after all, far bigger, boasting some 800,000 standing troops compared with Ukraine’s 200,000. Russia’s notorious mercenary group Wagner was already in the streets hunting for Zelensky. But Zelensky did not run, and as Ukraine pushed back, blowing up bridges and tanks when civilians took up arms, he became the symbol of his nation’s resistance.

By Christmas, after a September lightning offensive, Ukraine had reclaimed more than 74,000 square kilometres of territory. In nearly every liberated town, they found evidence of Russian atrocities: civilians raped and murdered; children taken over the border for forced “re-education”; cultural icons destroyed. Ukrainian momentum grew. Then winter came, freezing the war in a violent, slow-moving fight over the south-east. Putin is said to have radically scaled back his plans to take Ukraine outright, although missiles still fall as far as Lviv in the west.