It’s always been russia so Let’s not Repeat Mistakes of 1945

The current russian war against Ukraine is not a sudden, isolated act of brutality, detached from the long history of moscow’s perverted imperial hunger to invade, conquer, dominate and destroy the country and all Ukrainians. The centuries-long aggression has also not been disconnected from the long line of occupants of the kremlin’s corner office and the entire russian nation but rather has been instigated and encouraged by both.

This hard-to-fathom duration and vast national acquiescence is not lost upon the former captive nations of russian subjugation that have been warily observing russia’s invasion of Ukraine, helping their kindred nation with arms while reinforcing their borders and restocking their arsenals. Just as we have been writing about this inevitable russo-Ukraine war so too have the Eastern European nations been expecting such an explosion.

Among them is Prime Minister of Estonia Kaja Kallas, who at the recent Copenhagen Democracy Summit 2023 accused the russian people of culpability for the invasion of Ukraine.

“But it’s not just Putin’s war. The Russian people also have a responsibility – as long as territorial expansion is considered a virtue in Russia, and human lives lost are its acceptable side-effects, Russia’s aggression will sooner or later return and there can be no lasting peace in Europe,” she stated.

“Recognizing national guilt and taking personal responsibility for it is the basis for a society to have a future. It is also a basis for breaking Russia’s cycle of violence and aggression.”

The point about recognizing national guilt is well taken. Images of russia’s crimes against humanity and war crimes in Ukraine are as prevalent as those of Nazi crimes against Jews and will serve as a blatant reminder for future generations of russians of their predecessors’ inhumanity.

After visiting Bucha with Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko, Kallas remarked “This place is heartbreaking. The horrors of Bucha revealed to the whole world the nature of the Russian occupation, which Estonians and other countries in our region remember well from their own history. These atrocities are far from limited to Bucha.”

According to the prime minister, in addition to the fight for freedom, Ukraine must win the fight for justice.

“The russian leadership must be held accountable for the crime of aggression, genocide and crimes against humanity. Murders, rapes and deportations must be seen as tools of the russian regime in its criminal policy against the Ukrainian people,” Kallas added.

The russians’ collective national responsibility for crimes against humanity in Ukraine was also noted by an article in The Ukrainian Quarterly by Askold S. Lozynskyj, a noted Ukrainian global civic leader and writer, who said that in the past century russia has been responsible for two acts of genocide against Ukrainians.

“The recent abhorrent directive by the Moscow allegedly Christian Orthodox Church ‘to wipe Ukrainians off the face of the earth’ has been used in the past. In 1932-33 the Kremlin murdered 7-10 million Ukrainians through an imposed famine referred to as the Holodomor. A similar event except with rockets and bullets is taking place today. Fortunately, so far the numbers are not as staggering, but then the Russians do not have control of Ukrainian territory as in 1932-33,” Lozynskyj wrote.

It must be remembered that putin along with russian liberals and chauvinists are cut from the same anti-Ukrainian cloth.

Lozynskyj wrote: “Putin is not an outlier! He’s simply a muscovite! He is like the aforesaid muscovite archpriest, or the liberal dissident Russian poet, Brodsky who is not alone in his Ukrainophobia. There was the preeminent Russian dissident Oleksandr Solzhenitsyn who wrote: ‘Not the whole of Ukraine in its current formal Soviet borders is indeed Ukraine. Some regions … clearly lean more towards Russia. As for Crimea, Khrushchev’s decision to hand it over to Ukraine was totally arbitrary.’

“Solzhenitsyn's mother was Ukrainian. Does not Solzhenitsyn sound like putin? There were, are, and will be others like him. There is, of course, the russian mother whose soldier son rapes and kills innocent Ukrainian children upon her directive. Solzhenitsyn’s antisemitism was prevalent as well. After all he considered himself a great russian and that meant chauvinism and the denigration of others because that is what great russians do.”

The latest iteration of russian aggression against Ukraine exhibits the same brutality as the Soviet troops that occupied much of eastern and central Europe during the Second World War, Kallas pointed out.

While Ukraine’s Western partners have been analyzing Russian capabilities on display through more than one year of a full-scale war, Kallas said the European Union and NATO must also end what she called the “historical cycle” of Russian aggression against its neighbors.

“I’m very surprised that they haven’t changed since the Second World War,” Kallas told Newsweek in an exclusive interview at Stenbock House, the official seat of the Estonian government in Tallinn.

“The way they operate, the brutality, the atrocities; it hasn’t changed at all. And the question that I have in my mind is, how is that possible, really, in 2022 or 2023? But it is still so.”

Kallas said hoping for successful negotiations or compromise to end the war is misplaced.

“The war ends when Russia realizes it was a mistake, like they did with the (Cold War-era) war in Afghanistan. When they realize that they can’t win this war, then they’ll stop. And that’s why it’s very important that we are behind Ukraine saying that we are ready to go on as long as you, we are supporting Ukraine as long as it takes. And it’s also important for Russians to see that the will of the Ukrainians is not breakable,” she said.

Russia must be forced to accept the inevitability of its loss in Ukraine. The free world must be obviously committed to helping Ukraine defeat russia, which could then lead to internal revolution that will lead to the dismemberment of the evil empire and freedom for the scores of still enslaved peoples.

Whether the war in Ukraine has entered its final battles or it will last for decades as some demented russian leaders predict, the free world is faced with a scenario similar to the one faced by the allies in the final weeks of World War II. The story is well known. Gen. George Patton’s army was on the verge of taking Prague while the soviet red army was still days away. But the American commander was stopped by Churchill who told him that Prague was in moscow’s designated sphere of influence.

Patton was quite prophetic in his comments about russia in 1945:

“We promised the Europeans freedom. It would be worse than dishonorable not to see they have it. This might mean war with the Russians, but what of it? They have no Air Force anymore, their gasoline and ammunition supplies are low. I’ve seen their miserable supply trains; mostly wagons drawn by beaten up old horses or oxen. I’ll say this; the Third Army alone with very little help and with damned few casualties, could lick what is left of the Russians in six weeks. You mark my words. Don't ever forget them. Someday we will have to fight them and it will take six years and cost us six million lives.”

The United States and other free world countries also promised to stand with Ukraine as long as it takes and restore Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial inviolability. They are honor bound to fulfill that pledge. Ukraine must not be forced to abandon victory over russia for misguided hope for better relations with moscow.

Keep in mind the eternal warning of the 19th century Ukrainian bard Taras Shevchenko:

“Fall in love with marigolds,
but not with the Muscovites,
Because Muscovites are strange people,
They do evil to you!”