War in Ukraine: How Did we Get There and is There a Way Out of It?

In 2022 the world has entered into a phase of geopolitical and geo-economic reconfiguration with the emergence of multipolar elements. The armed conflict on the territory of Ukraine is a military phase of a geopolitical standoff between the collective West, embodied mainly by the United States and NATO, and those for whom Western domination is not acceptable, epitomized in that case by Russia. But how did the world, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and justified expectations of a peaceful future, find itself in a situation where the use of military force has become almost normal, at least until it is used against those Europeans who had chosen the “right side of history”? How and why, towards the end of history, the most important principles of international law became twisted and reinterpreted to such an extent that soon there may not be a last man left to contemplate this end? As history gives some hints about right as well as wrong ways of ending military confrontations, I will try to show in this essay how it all went wrong and what could be done about it.