Courtesy of Robert Hansen
"Putin is taking a page from Hitler’s playbook:
Winston Churchill once advised, “Study history, study history. In history, lies all the secrets of statecraft.” Churchill's recommendation may be good advice for us. What did Hitler do back in the '30s?All … the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying ‘they're not being treated right. I must go and protect my people,' and that's what's gotten everybody so nervous.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin's justification for his naked aggression is in fact disturbingly similar to Hitler's rhetoric to defend the Volksdeutsche, a term for ethnic Germans who lived outside the Reich. Of course all the talk about merely protecting ethnic Germans was nothing but a pretext. And so is Putin's. There are ethnic Russians throughout the former Soviet republics, from Belarus to Tajikistan.
Putin is “on the wrong side of history.” So was Hitler. But a lot of carnage occurred before he was stopped.
Putin has paid lip service to international critics by justifying his actions in Ukraine as a response to lawlessness, claiming Russia’s military assets are under threat and there is evidence of a “humanitarian crisis.” Putin's aims on Ukraine are remarkably reminiscent of his military intervention in Georgia in 2008. And it certainly provides the kind of brazen confrontation with the United States and Europe that Putin has provoked time and again.
This international crisis calls for able diplomacy, but it is not advisable to start taking options off the table. The United States and NATO are admittedly war-weary, as were the Allies in the wake of World War I. Some are hoping the former KGB official will be content with annexations in Crimea and the Caucasus, but if history repeats itself, Putin will takeover the Ukraine before any military response from the West can be mounted. Sanctions against Russia have proven to have no real effect against Putin’s aggression. Russia's President showed he has no real advisers left—only sycophants—and his own views are as extreme as any of theirs.
The Russian President claimed that Ukraine’s very existence was a historical mistake; that it was only a matter of time before it would build nukes to threaten Russia; and that its allies in the West have been wielding Ukraine against Russia like a “knife to the throat.” Such claims, as well as the seething tone with which Putin delivered them, have come in the past from the most infamous paranoiac in his retinue, the security chief Nikolai Patrushev. Putin’s speech showed there is no longer any daylight between his own views and those of the KGB’s reactionary stalwarts."
On my personal take: China and Xi Jinping are closely following Putin's move. They could emulate the same in Taiwan and South China Sea.