Russia Assaults Ukraine
Putin’s actions are a chilling repeat of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland
It’s happened. On February 21st, 2022, President Vladimir Putin officially signed documents recognizing two regions in Ukraine as sovereign states. He was joined by a handful of nations, while opposed by a vast majority of the international community. But this isn’t the first of Russia’s blatant violations of international agreements, and it only sets grounds for war with Ukraine in the future.
It began in 2013, as Russian troops and Russian-backed “separatists”, many of which were just Russian agents, cropped up across Eastern Ukraine. First in Crimea, the ‘Little Green Men’ — unmarked Russian troops — were quickly mirrored by similar forces in the East. In fact, the first leaders of the ‘states’ Russia has just recognized were former FSB agents — the successor to the infamous KGB. It was a disgusting and blatant takeover of a sovereign country in the guise of ‘freedom’. Russian propaganda has blasted fears of the Ukrainian far right out of proportion, and mentions of the 2000-strong Azov Battalion have dwarfed similar stories about redeployment of Russia’s own, Nazi-worshipping Wagner Group. It’s a horrific mess of misinformation targeted at creating an image of Ukraine as a anti-Semitic country that targets ethnic russian minorities — all the while as a Russian Jew, Vlodimir Zelensky, currently presides as President after winning one of the largest landslides in Ukrainian history.
Putin’s speech was a rejection of Ukraine as a concept, claiming it’s just a puppet of the West, or a fraudulent identity. It’s not much different from the rampant anti-Ukrainian sentiment that contributed to the Holodomor, and Putin’s blood and soil narrative is nothing more than ethnonationalism packaged into some call to “Ancient Russian Identity”. Ethnic boundaries are no way to define a country, and that’s a lesson that we ought to have learned from a certain Germany dictator from the 30s and 40s. Russia claims that Eastern Ukraine is ethnically and demographically Russian. It’s a meritless claim to territory they don’t control, much like Hitler’s claims to Austria were meritless. It is, however, the basis for the recognition of the two breakaway regions.
Let’s talk about international agreements for a moment, shall we? Ukraine first signed an agreement relinquishing nuclear weapons, called the Budapest Memorandum. This agreement offered security guarantees to Ukraine in exchange for the denuclearization, however, Russia has ignored those agreements since 2014. However, in 2014, a new set of treaties, the Minsk Agreements were put into place. They were meant to prevent the exact situation currently playing out in Luhansk and Donetsk, and Russia, has, quite predictably, ignored them. In recognizing the regions as independent countries, Russia has also given itself an easy casus belli. Nearly two thirds of both Luhansk and Donetsk are currently under Ukrainian control, and yet, Putin has commanded both regions to expel Ukrainian troops from their borders. Russian troops have rolled in, and now, it’s very easy to attack a bordering Ukrainian patrol for “crossing the territories”. In essence, Putin has all but declared war, and all the while, the West has ignored the pleas of Ukraine for assistance. The country is now militarily facing the Russian Federation, and it may go the way of Georgia and Chechnya.
Ukraine is a geopolitical prize for Putin. It signals the weakening of NATO, an organization now incapable of protecting nations it had pledged to protect. It gives Putin control over one of the largest agricultural centers in the world, and it would make him a kingmaker in the middle east and africa. It would be the silencing of one of the most pro-democracy countries in Europe, and the ever creeping expansion of an authoritarian regime into allied territory. Russia is skirting the same line that Hitler was in 1936, except this time the US and NATO are prepared but unwilling. The half-baked sanctions that the US has imposed must go farther, and prevent Russia from expanding its borders and engulfing other democratic states. If NATO wants to continue to protect it’s nations, it must prevent the annexation of Ukraine.
