Putin appears to be recreating the Russian Empire – with himself, of course, as Tzar. While calling himself “President” not “Tzar,” he has succeeded within Russia and he has extended his dominion to Belarus and eastern Ukraine.
The rest of Ukraine is obviously next. And then? The Baltics? Poland? Czechia & Slovakia?
I have friends who remember the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 (click here) and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (here).
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What Putin doesn’t want to consider is that the Soviet Union didn’t defeat Nazi Germany. Like the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union withstood Nazi Germany. This was especially true at Stalingrad, where the Nazis AND the Soviets each lost about 1.0 million soldiers. Neither the Soviets nor the British might have withstood the Nazis without the US Lend Lease program, which provided food, trucks, and weapons to UK and USSR.
My father drove and maintained some of those Chevy trucks and Jeeps. He would think Putin is an idiot, a dangerous idiot, who apparently doesn’t really know or or understand 20th Century Russian history. But just like some in America don’t want to teach American history, teaching instead some sanitized pablum, it seems that they didn’t teach Russian history in Soviet schools.
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