It’s a scene from another time. Young soldiers standing with an old rifle in their hands staring at the no-man’s land in front of them for months, sometimes years. Fatigue, boredom, loneliness and fear. Contrasting feelings mixing up with the heat of summer or the ice cold of winter. That is what I witnessed in my visits to Karabakh over the last several years. I remember meeting a boy from Yerevan in a military base in Martuni, next to the frontline. After we spoke for a couple of minutes, he smiled to me and my colleague and said, “I will never forget you.” I wonder how immense his solitude must have been to say something like this.

Only time looks frozen at this frontier of Europe, not the conflict. Soldiers know that the tranquility on the front may last long, but it’s just an illusion. Hundreds of lives were lost during the Four Day War last April and in other escalations over the last few years.

In Karabakh you can see kilometres of trenches running parallel along the front, reminiscent of the ones during the Great War one hundred years ago. For a European observer, this comparison is impossible to ignore. If today we don’t have the human wave attacks that cost countless victims at that time, it’s also true that the Karabakh conflict lasted longer – more than 25 years – and is still far from a resolution.

As an Italian, I find it painful to see how trenches that look identical to those used in the Alps during the war described by Pope Benedict XV as an “useless slaughter” still exist. Analysts and media tend to insist on the geopolitical implications of the Karabakh conflict, often underlying how this small-scale confrontation could erupt one day into something bigger, with a possible domino-effect for neighbouring countries. But this is just one aspect of the conflict, and not the most urgent. Largely ignored by the international community, the conflict is also a long-lasting humanitarian crisis. An issue that, until the present day, nobody really wanted to address. Not even after the April War, and this despite several announcements made by European politicians one year ago.