As we approach the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine this Saturday, ask yourself a simple question: is Europe at war? When I put this to a room full of participants at the Munich security conference last Sunday, most of them raised their hands to say yes, Europe is at war. But then I asked a second question: do you think most people in your own country have woken up to this? Very few hands went up.

This was a Munich of painful contrasts. Here, at the conference, were badly wounded Ukrainian soldiers giving us stories from a frontline hell. Yuliia Paievska, a veteran military medic, told us she had seen “streams of blood, rivers of suffering”, and that “children have died in my arms”. “We are the dogs of war,” she said, recalling how she herself was captured in Mariupol, imprisoned for three months and tortured by the Russians. “Give us the weapons,” she concluded, “to kill this war.”

Here, too, was the courage of a Russian Yulia. Yulia Navalnaya came on stage even before the news of the death of her husband, Alexei Navalny, had been fully confirmed, to call for Vladimir Putin to be brought to justice – and to remind us that there is still another Russia, fighting the tyrant. She went on to record a deeply moving, defiant video that you can watch on YouTube.

But stepping outside the conference venue in the Bayerischer Hof hotel, I found weekend crowds enjoying the unseasonal sunshine in nice cafes and bars, shopping in luxurious boutiques or booking a winter break to some attractive holiday destination. Prosperous, even pampered, peacetime life. Europe at war? You must be joking.

At this year’s conference, western leaders acknowledged the reality of a long war more clearly than they did last year, but most are........

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