Reading through military historian John Keegan's comprehensive and brilliant tome, The Second World War, I was struck by the massive and unmissable parallels between Nazi Germany's actions in the prelude to the war, and modern Russia's actions in Ukraine and elsewhere.

By March 1938 Hitler felt free to move against Austria. He first demanded that Austrian Nazis be installed in key government posts. When Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Austrian Chancellor, refused, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian Nazi leader, was instructed to declare himself head of a provisional government and request German intervention.

Compare Russia's encouragement of a separatist movement in Ukraine. After illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, Russia began arming and abetting separatists in the Donbas region. Ukraine's democratically elected government acted to suppress the revolt, giving Russia the pretext to claim, by 2022, that they were invading to "protect" the very separatists they had sponsored.

Moscow also claimed a duty to protect the roughly 8 million ethnic Russians living in Ukraine from their own government, despite the fact that it was Russian machinations that had supposedly placed them in danger in the first place. Compare Germany's actions later in 1938:

In April [Hitler] ordered OKW to prepare plans for a military operation, meanwhile instructing the Nazi groups among the Sudetenland Germans to sustain demands for secession... on 12 September, when he delivered a fiery anti-Czech speech at Nuremberg, German troops moved to the frontier.

Again we have incitement to sympathizers in another nation, followed by a "special military operation". Soon after, the rape of Czechoslovakia was accomplished.

Personally, I don't understand how there is anyone outside of Russia still defending the invasion of Ukraine. Putin's actions come straight from Hitler's playbook. The only difference is his blaming NATO and the EU for Ukraine's 2013 democratic revolution, which expelled a deeply corrupt and incompetent Russia-sponsored government. Putin framed the revolution as a Western-backed “fascist coup” that endangered the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea. (Western leaders dismissed this as baseless propaganda reminiscent of the Soviet era.) In response, Putin ordered a covert invasion of Crimea that he later justified as a rescue operation. “There is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our western partners have crossed the line,” Putin said in March 2014, formalizing the annexation.

Those who blame the West for "provoking" Russia ignore that it was the popular will of Ukrainians themselves that expelled Putin's puppet president. The aggressor throughout has been Putin's Russia. Nostalgia for the days of the Soviet empire, and resentment over the growth of Western influence in the old Soviet sphere, is the reason for the invasion of Ukraine. It is not self-defense. It is simple resentment for the loss of empire, hunger for power and territory... the kind that propelled Adolf Hitler.

I don't understand how everyone doesn't see this. Luckily, the Biden administration and the governments of Europe see it all too clearly.