Appeasement : The Road to the Russo–Ukrainian War

Vladimir Putin began his all-out war on Ukraine on February 24, 2022.I participated in my first anti-war rally on February 27, 2022, three days after the invasion.Approximately 300 people in downtown Vienna protested the war and held anti-war signs.A friend of mine pointed to one of the signs carried by a young woman clad in a Ukrainian blue-and-yellow flag.The poster, held above her head, bore the legend: "Hey Putin, Let's Speed Up to the Part Where You Kill Yourself in a Bunker!"The allusion was to Hitler.On returning home and searching the web, I found that an almost identical sign was carried at a protest rally in Berlin on February 25, the day after the invasion.However, the comparison of Putin's actions to those of Hitler was not new. 2 In March 2014, on the eve of the pseudo-referendum conducted by the Russian authorities in the recently occupied Crimea, historian Andrei Zubov, a professor at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, compared Putin's planned annexation of the peninsula to Hitler's Anschluss of Austria in 1938.Zubov drew parallels between Hitler's vision of Greater Germany and Russia's reunification rhetoric, pointing out that both annexations had been justified to the public as measures to protect the allegedly persecuted minorities; Germans (in Czechoslovakia) in the former and Russians in the latter.Zubov called the referendum a sham intended to provide legal cover for forcible annexation.The official results of the Russian referendum, which no independent observer was allowed to attend, claimed 97 percent support for the annexation of the peninsula, slightly less than the 99.73 percent support reported in Hitler's referendum.Crimea was promptly integrated into the Russian Federation as the "Republic of Crimea," losing the autonomous status that it had enjoyed as a part of Ukraine. 3 Zubov was dismissed from his prestigious position at the country's top diplomatic school.However, he did not lose the argument.A few days after the publication of his piece, Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. Secretary of State and the Democratic nominee for the presidency, compared Putin's use of the Russian ethnic card to Hitler's use of the German ethnic card.In Britain, Prince Charles drew a comparison between Putin and Hitler on