The world watched in disbelief as 130,000 Russian troops assembled at the north and eastern perimeter of Ukraine, and then invaded.
However, when America made its shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, I wondered if Biden’s declaration that the USA is not the world’s policeforce was an open invitation for Putin to test the resolve of NATO.
In 2014, Putin illegally annexed Crimea and NATOs only response was to impose sanctions that were no deterrence at all. He views the West as weak and too afraid of war to confront him. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Russian passports have been issued to citizens living in east Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions, a move followed recently by Putin’s unilateral declaration of “independence” of this region.
Media reports have compared Putin with Hitler, but to me the more appropriate role model is Stalin. Like Putin’s pretext for invading east Ukraine in 2022, Stalin ordered Soviet troops into eastern Poland in 1939 to allegedly protect Soviet citizens living there. Like Putin’s plea to the Ukrainian army to give up its arms and instead of fighting a senseless war (instigated by him), Stalin’s Red Army invited Polish troops to come over their side; it was a ruse that resulted in their arrest and a death sentence of hard labor in Siberia.
I hope that the crippling sanctions NATO has now imposed will bring an end to Putin’s insane ambition to reconstruct Stalin’s Soviet empire. But the West must face some hard truths about its own failings and lack of resolve to defend eastern Europe.
At the end of World War II, America and Britain allowed Stalin to engulf a massive territory in which many countries passed from the tyrannical regime of the Nazis to the equally sadistic rule of the Soviets. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the former Soviet-controlled states of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania all joined NATO, and understandably Ukraine has similar aspirations.
The spectre of another Soviet rule in these countries is too terrible to contemplate. In Ukraine alone, under Stalin’s orders, 3.5 million peopel starved to death in 1932-33. The West knows almost nothing about this and other Soviet atrocities that went unpunished.
Russia’s membership of the United Nations makes a mockery of international law. At the end of World War II, Nazis were rightly prosecuted for their war crimes, but not a single member of the Soviet regime faced justice for similar abominations.
It is high time we recognized their crimes and pay due respect to their millions of victims.
nadiarupniak.com 