History is repeating itself. The world underwent this dark period eight decades ago. A man has risen to power carrying delusions of grandeur and dreams of expansion beyond his country’s territory, which no longer fits his ambitions. On top of that, he carries a score to settle with the legacy of the “aggression” of the past that his country had been subjected to at the victors’ hands.
Adolf Hitler arrives at the Chancellery in Berlin to avenge the Treaty of Versailles. Vladimir Putin arrives at the Kremlin to avenge the agreements between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that brought the curtain down on the Soviet era and deprived Moscow of its leadership of 14 neighboring countries. However, it did open the door to the European continent for Russia, a step that was supposed to be a gateway to turning them into a single family whose relationships are shaped by the principles of friendly neighborliness and respect for the right of this continent’s countries to manage their affairs as their citizens choose.
Putin is not Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin. He is a student of a different school. It does not recognize the culpability of the Kremlin leadership during the communist era for what happened to the Soviet Union. Instead, his conspiracy theory leads him to consider this collapse to have been the result of a Western plot to weaken the Russian leadership and impose a unipolar world order. He sees the decision of neighboring countries that had been part of the Soviet orbit to join the European bloc and NATO as nothing more than part of that plan.
Putin does not recognize these countries’ right to choose their own destiny because he simply does not believe they have a right to be independent states. This is his fundamental issue with Ukraine, as well as the three Baltic states that face the specter of a similar fate if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine succeeds and Putin is allowed to install the regime of his choice in Kyiv.
As the German Chancellor said yesterday, it is a terrible day for Ukraine and a dark day for Europe. Because Olaf Scholz hails from Germany, he knows well the heavy tax that Russia will pay because of this aggression and has it in mind when he says that history will demonstrate that Putin committed a grave mistake that will be disastrous for Russia.
But the responsibility is not on Putin’s shoulders alone. The West has chosen to ignore the Russian president’s plans for over two decades, during which he has been “experimenting” with the limits of the West’s reactions to his violations of the rules that govern international relations. Forget about his domestic policies and his assault on the principle of the peaceful transfer of power, which the West considered internal matters. Putin has been poisoning his opponents in Western capitals.
He turned the tables in Syria, perpetuating Bashar al-Assad’s hold on power despite broad regional and international condemnation of the Syrian regime’s crimes against its people. He has used Russia’s Security Council veto to prevent investigations into these crimes on several occasions. He also allied himself with the Iranian regime despite this Tehran’s interventions in several Arab countries. He invaded and occupied Crimea under the pretext that it is “Russian territory” and then sent his forces to the two separatist provinces in eastern Ukraine under the pretext that Ukrainians of Russian origin reside there, repeating the argument Hitler had made when he annexed Austria and the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia under the pretext that Germans make up the majority there.
Putin did all of this while the world watched and did nothing but issue condemnations and statements. Even when western intelligence reports affirmed the Russian president’s intention to invade Ukraine, western leaders rushed to the end of that long and humiliating table they were forced to sit at as though they were in court, begging him not to invade his neighbor. Meanwhile, the US president was reassuring Putin that he would not send US forces to Ukraine... What other conclusion could Putin have reached from all of this beyond an assessment that the West is totally incapable of standing up to him and has given him the green light to do whatever he wants in Ukraine?
History is repeating itself. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier’s attempts to appease Hitler were repeated by Macron and Scholz, whose attempts were never going to succeed. As he sat with them to negotiate, Putin’s military was planning the attack on Ukraine.
History is not rewritten with ink, but blood. Europe found this out thanks to the recklessness of a man who came to Munich fleeing Austria and ended up destroying his country and much of Europe’s cities with it, leaving Germany with heavy burdens that it carried for half a century before being allowed to unite again and reestablish relations with its neighbors after prohibiting a return to that dark era in its history without erasing its people’s memory.
This is what Europe is witnessing today at the hands of another madman who has come to take revenge from his communist-Bolshevik predecessors, whom he accuses of “creating” his neighbor Ukraine. Just as invading Poland after claiming that it had never been an independent or normal state was the first step on Hitler’s path, it appears that today, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, starting from its eastern provinces, is founded on the same argument: it was never a normal and genuine state.
However, the Russian President ignores the fact that this country, known as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the time, had been part of the Soviet orbit and that its president had been designated by the Kremlin. At that time, 45 million Ukrainians had the right to an entity with its own borders and its own capital. Now, Putin says he will not allow the country to continue to enjoy this right until they are subjugated and the leadership of his choice is imposed on them.
It is a dark page of European history. Putin is not the only one responsible. The policies of leniency and appeasement of the KGB’s spoilt prince, whom Westerners convinced themselves had taken off that robe, were bound to lead to what we are witnessing today.
