April 30

Today is April 30th, the end of the Celtic winter. Tomorrow, May 1st, is Bealltain Bhuidhe, the Yellow Beltane, after the colour of some of the flowers that are out at this time of year. In certain parts of Europe, this day is referred to as St Walpurgis Night, the night that the ghosts and spectres of winter are exorcised and banished. It marks the start, particularly in the north, of the long evenings when darkness never really falls.

Back in 1945, this was the day that Adolf Hitler took his own life. An evil spirit banished from this earth. We must never forget, and never forget that although Hitler was evil, his reign was enabled by political decisions made in preceding decades.

The same applies to Vladimir Putin today, as lessons from the 1930s and 40s were patently forgotten. What he can get away with, he will get away with. And that is something that was not properly recognised, something that we will be paying a price for.

Putin - isolated

I'm looking past the images of destruction, atrocities, suffering, displacement and horror. I see the man, who started a war - although his people are not allowed to call it that - on spurious grounds. Vladimir Putin (69), president of Russia. He is used to deploying tactics of "let's see what I can get away with". Forgetting that starting a war is ruled by the Laws of Unintended Consequences, the enterprise has blown up in his face in a breathtaking fashion. He will probably end up achieving his goals militarily. But at what cost. The human cost will be beyond imagination. However, my point is more the political and economic cost. Apart from half a dozen crackpot dictatorships, such as North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Myanmar and the like, no nation on this earth overtly supports him. That leaves a very lonely, isolated man, perhaps cut off from reality. A very dangerous situation, also because he commands thousands of nuclear warheads. Unlikely to be used, but still. He has, after 8 days of fighting, not abandoned his vision for Europe, as being his fiefdom, his backyard. Cut off from NATO and the Americans, and the Russian Empire restored to its glory, as existed until 1989. And Ukraine coalesced into Russia. 

Putin is isolated, and has been since the pandemic kicked off two years ago. He will be surrounded by Yes Men, and his security apparatus is busy suppressing dissent. But this is 2022, not 1939. His economy is being asphyxiated, his sports men and women are now pariahs, and shipping and aircraft are not welcome anywhere anymore. 

How will this end? That is a question that those in power and authority around the world should be contemplating. Preferably by negotiation. But with a dogmatic individual like Vladimir Vladimirovich, that will be well-nigh impossible. He, like most Russians, does not like being compared to Hitler. Putin claims to be denazifying Ukraine - not realising he is behaving the way Hitler did between 1933 and 1945.  The parallels are disconcerting.

• Georgia 2008 - the Rhineland in 1936.
• Crimea 2014 - the Anschluß of Austria with Germany in March 1938 .
• Donetsk and Luhansk 2014 - the Sudetenland, spring 1939.
• Ukraine 2022 - Poland, September 1939. 

But that is where the parallels end abruptly. Poland was a walkover in 1939. Ukraine is resisting valiantly and the Russian campaign is lagging well behind schedule. Worse than that, from Putin's perspective, the world has rallied behind Ukraine within days, and he is left completely isolated. I will not look into the future, because wars are notoriously unpredictable. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, ten days after his 56th birthday. Putin will have his 70th birthday on October 7th. I wonder if there will be anything to celebrate for him by then.

Germany and Russia - 20th and 21st century

At the end of the First World War, in June 1919, a peace treaty was signed between the warring parties. It became known as the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty imposed punitive measures against Germany, firmly laying the blame for the conflict with the country, although if blame be apportioned, all were equally culpable. 

Germany lost territory and felt humiliated. In the 1920s, the country suffered an economic meltdown, with inflation skyrocketing - at one point, the US dollar was worth 1 million million Mark. Then, over the following 16 years, Adolf Hitler gradually rose to power, promising to make Germany great again. He retook the Saarland and Rhineland areas, which had been taken from Germany. Nobody opposed this aggression. In March 1938, he annexed Austria - with nobody opposing. In September 1938, with mounting concerns over war, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich for talks with Hitler. At the time, the slaughter of World War 1 were still fresh in people's memories, and all thought was to avert another bloody conflict. Hitler reassured Chamberlain, and Neville's famous quote "Peace for our time" was to become the slogan for appeasement. In the early spring of 1939, Germany annexed the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovkia, and occupied the remainder of that country. In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, which heralded six years of war. 

Fast forward 50 years. In 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Warsaw Pact of countries also under communist rule collapsed. These included Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland. Russia lost its empire of satellite states that used to be part of the Soviet Union. Think of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Georgia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan. And -

Ukraine. 

Then, along came a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin. Born in 1952, Mr Putin served in the former German Democratic Republic until that state collapsed in 1990. Vladimir has been prime minister and president of the Russian Federation for more than twenty years. He has enjoyed popularity at the polls, on a ticket of making Russia great again. In fact, it is suggested that he would like to restore the old empire of the Soviet Union. Moves to that effect were seen with an incursion into Georgia in 2008, and the annexation of the Crimean peninsula, part of Ukraine, in 2014. The insurrection in eastern Ukraine, which started in the same year, has been on-going to date. It has led to the establishment of two break-away states around Donetsk and Luhansk. And since the start of 2022, Russia has built up a huge array of its armed forces around Ukraine. To date, 21 February, the tally stands at 190,000. Some of these are positioned in Belarus, ruled by Putin's henchman Alexander Lukashenko. Although frantic talks continue to date to avert war, signs are ominous that the pretext for an invasion of Ukraine is already being created. Is the diplomacy another attempt at appeasement, to achieve peace for our time? As I type this, news comes through that Russia has accused Ukraine of invading its territory and killed three troops - a claim hotly denied by Kyiv. A possible pretext for an attack.

We saw what happened when Adolf Hitler promised to make Germany great again in the 1930s. I do not expect Vladimir Putin to like being compared to Adolf Hitler. Russia suffered greatly through Nazi Germany's invasion of its territory between 1941 and 1944. It lost 20 million of its popultion as a result. But an invasion of Ukraine could lead to a European conflagration which could have an equally devastating consequence. 

Just became Putin wants to make Russia great again.