Maurizio Donini The disintegration of the Soviet Union triggered a series of autonomist and independence movements that led to the birth of new states, often at the end of bloody wars. There are also “frozen conflicts” — disputes marked by armed clashes that remain unresolved and periodically flare back up. For nearly thirty years, Nagorno-Karabakh was the archetype of this purgatory. When I first looked into this subject in 2020, the war had resumed with great violence: the flare-up that occurred between September and October of that year ended with a dramatic toll of roughly 5,000 dead and 30,000 displaced. At the time, Europe was culpably absent, paralysed by the urgency of Covid and oblivious to the rest of the world, while the United States seemed trapped by the isolationism of the Trump presidency and distracted by its own domestic elections. The Western vacuum was quickly filled by Vladimir Putin, who imposed a peace plan signed in Moscow and guaranteed by the deployment of 2,000 Russian troops. At the time, the prevailing view was that it was unlikely the Kremlin would withdraw those troops once the agreement’s five-year term expired. ...