A war is something you fight against another country. It has been mocked as a propaganda euphemism, but it is what he actually thinks. Take, for example, his famous phrase “special military operation” to describe his invasion. They have been forced to confront Putin’s black logic. The 15 months since the failed invasion has given Ukraine’s allies a crash course in war studies, learning what might previously have taken an entire academic career. Britain, led at the time by Boris Johnson, was clearer-sighted, and remains so under Rishi Sunak.
In the early days, France and Germany, in particular, sought potentially ignominious escape routes. We therefore tend to evade reality and cast about for complicated diplomatic solutions. Putin is not, currently, trying to kill us, although he likes muttering threats of nuclear obliteration. The wider world concentrates its mind less. So I must kill at least three of them and preferably 15 or 20.” The knowledge that someone is trying to kill you concentrates the mind. As one soldier put it to me: “The Russians have three times our population and they want to kill us. That is why they have fought so well, and are about to counter-attack once more. Like a lesser Stalin, Putin already is deporting, torturing and murdering them. They know that an invader who denies their national existence will also deny them their rights and their lives. Putin shows every sign of doing the same. Hitler stuck to his twisted version of his country’s destiny. Locked down by his own Covid restrictions, Putin wrote his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, claiming there is no such country as Ukraine.
Jailed in the 1920s, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, setting out his race theories and territorial ambitions with a frankness that most people, strangely, ignored. In his mind, it is what the defeat of Germany in 1918 was in Hitler’s – the humiliation which must be avenged. He sees Mikhail Gorbachev’s dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1991 as the great catastrophe for Russia. He certainly has no objection to the private appropriation of the fruits of mass labour by a privileged few. When he invaded Ukraine last year, they fled to Germany – exiles once again, persecuted by the same mindset for 80 years. Early this century, as Putin’s threats to the peninsula grew, her parents moved to Kyiv. In 1989, as the Soviet grip loosened, Sevgil’s surviving family returned to Crimea. When he tried to wake her, he found she was dead. On the terrible, waterless train journey east, the boy thought his mother was asleep. Sevgil’s own great-grandmother, aged 40, was one of those deported, travelling with her 13-year-old son. By chance, our meeting took place on the day that commemorates Stalin’s deportation of the Tartars from their native Crimea in 1944.
In Kyiv last month, I met Sevgil Musayeva, the editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda, the country’s independent online newspaper. Throughout his empire, he constantly moved ethnic groups, forcibly and en masse, to distant regions where they could barely survive. In the case of Ukraine, Stalin had, in the early 1930s, imposed the Holodomor (“death by hunger”), deliberately starving perhaps five million people.
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His thoughts were as dark as Hitler’s, and victory left him free to continue to persecute the peoples he already controlled. Victory in 1945 enabled him to extend the Russian empire well beyond its old Tsarist borders. Some people may still harbour his dark thoughts, but his ideology remains disgraced. It helps explain why Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last year and why his defeat in the ensuing conflict is essential to world peace. This double-edged victory has dominated the world order ever since, its ill effects surviving long after the Cold War ended. Yes, we defeated Nazism, but only with the vital aid of Soviet communism. Unfortunately, we are not much more than half right. We think of the Second World War as a virtuous struggle.
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