Vladimir Putin’s recognition of two Russian-backed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine as independent, along with his subsequent deployment of troops and tanks to the regions, has moved Europe closer to the brink of war.
Despite many differences, there are echoes of 1938 in current developments. Putin may not be Hitler; Ukraine in 2022 isn’t Czechoslovakia in 1938; and French president Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, and their western colleagues aren’t some sort of collective Chamberlain. But 1938 does carry important lessons: the most important being that deterrence may seem more expensive and risky than accommodation today, but it is essential for Europe’s long-term security.
Putin, though a brutal authoritarian leader, is not a charismatic madman like Hitler. He has used targeted repression and assassinations to control the Russian opposition, rather than concentration camps. His ideology is flexible: for all his anti-western rhetoric, he and his associates have often kept their money and their families in the west.
What Putin has in common with Hitler, however, is a mystical belief in a nation stretching beyond his country’s current borders. Putin sees Ukraine as the key to this “Russian world”. In his speech on Monday announcing the recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics”, Putin spoke of Ukraine as an “integral part of our own history, culture and spiritual space” and described the creation of a Ukrainian Soviet republic by Lenin as “the tearing away from Russia of a part of its own historical territories”. Last year he wrote that there was no historical basis for a Ukrainian people separate from Russians. » | Ian Bond * | Tuesday, February 22, 2022
* Ian Bond is the director of foreign policy at the independent thinktank, the Centre for European Reform, and a former British diplomat.
