The feeling that history might have ended belonged to the summer of 1990. With shards of the wall that once divided Europe lying scattered around Berlin, it was easy to believe that the horrors of the 20th century were exhausted, largely without more blood having to be shed. A continent chastened by the catastrophes of competing millenarian nightmares and abandoned empires could, it seemed, start to enjoy itself. If the impression of a new dawn of peace was punctured by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August that year, the first Gulf War was still cast as a “good” war to uphold international law.
That summer’s hopefulness was always a chimera. Few gave any thought as to how an independent Ukraine containing Sevastopol – a Russian Black Sea naval port since the days of Catherine the Great – could defend itself against a humiliated Russia without the new, pacific-minded Germany acting as a military protector.
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