What is this moment?
This is not just a moment for the full-time strategists, the diplomats and politicians, the international crisis committees, military protection alliances and intelligence analysts who are desperately trying to prevent a war in Europe.
This is also a moment for the professional epoch interpreters.
Putin's de facto declaration of war on Ukraine not only represents a Western policy based on the economy and communication, it demonstrates an entire understanding of history.
A thinking that equates the passage of time with constant new progress and is convinced that history does not repeat itself.
Around 1800, under the vehement impression of the French Revolution, the relationship between past and future began to be rearranged, and history itself became a subject that powerfully eludes all givens.
Since then, it has seemed clear: history does not teach, but happens - in ever new forms, in ever different, sometimes terrible ways.
Like, it's war?
When the Russian President held a memorable history lesson in front of the wide-open eyes of the world public, he was not only providing reasons for his military-political actions.
He also made it clear that he does not believe in the dogma of irreversible progress.
A young Berlin construction worker, interviewed by a local radio station yesterday morning at the bus stop, expressed his astonishment "that something like war in Europe is even conceivable again".
His astonishment is that of the western world.
Because not with naivety, but with the point of view of observation, if one simply could not imagine that a ruler in the 21st century would seriously appear as a historian on the throne and derive his aggressive actions in the present from the past would.
Europe – which often ignored the Yugoslavia conflict in the 1990s – looks back on almost eight decades of peace and growing prosperity.
It no longer has any experience with mobilization and Reich ideas.
These days, the 20th meets the 21st century: tanks are deployed, children are being trained in weapons, men proudly speak of defending their homeland - while in the west, until yesterday, war was actually only fought on the Internet, in the form of a cyber attack or a drone flight could imagine.
The struggle between East and West is no longer about ideology, it is not about capitalism versus communism.
It is now a struggle between two eras.
Some believe in the imperial idea, others orientate themselves towards the paradigm of communication.
The question remains what that leads to, other than the performance where one looks strong and the others look weak.