“We haven’t seen a conventional movement like this, from nation state to nation state, since World War II, certainly nothing of this size, scope and scale,” the official told reporters on Thursday. “And if it plays out in the way that we have so far come to believe it will, it has all the potential to be very bloody, very costly and very impactful on European security in general, perhaps for a very, very long time.”
“This is an assault on democracy, it’s not just an attack on Ukraine. This completely violates all the principles that have governed the world since the end of World War II,” says Paul Kolbe, a former senior CIA agent.
What happened to Ukraine during World War II and why are the later years of the Soviet era part of what analysts call the longing for Putin?
Ukraine in World War II
After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and towards the end of World War I, Ukraine was briefly an independent nation and in 1920 it became part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the Soviet Union.
In 1941, during World War II, Germany invaded Ukraine. More than six million Ukrainians, the vast majority of them civilians, died in the war.
Attack on Ukraine challenges world order, analysts sayIn 1944 the Soviet Union regained control of Ukraine under Joseph Stalin and expanded its borders to include territory taken from Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
In 1991, the Ukrainian parliament declared independence, and a referendum held on December 1 of that year ratified the separation.
Putin’s Soviet Nostalgia
Russian President Vladimir Putin considers Ukrainians and Russians “one people,” noting that the western edge of present-day Ukraine was incorporated into the Soviet Union by the late dictator Joseph Stalin.
Early in his presidency, Putin, a former colonel in Soviet KGB intelligence, told his nation: “The disappearance of the Union soviet It was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Ukraine was the republic soviet that Putin especially regretted losing.
Putin constructed a justification for the ongoing war in Ukraine last year when he published a 5,000-word landmark essay, essentially arguing that the Ukrainians and the Russians were one nation. Independent Ukraine, in his opinion, was an “artificial division” of two peoples, and therefore not a real state.
According to author Susan Glasser, Ukraine is the crown jewel that was lost. “Ukraine is a sister country. She wrote an entire essay…essentially spinning some sort of pseudo-historical tale about why Ukraine shouldn’t be separated from mother Russia.”
Experts say that Putin he has always held the view that the countries on Russia’s periphery have to be pro-Russian, and he sees a pro-Western Ukrainian government as a threat to that ideal.
Before the invasion, Putin gave a speech on the history of the Soviet Union, saying that modern Ukraine “was entirely created by communist Russia.”
For Putin, the territory of Ukraine “is being used by third countries to create threats against the Russian Federation itself,” he said.
Air-raid sirens sounded in Ukraine on Thursday for the first time since World War II, after Russia announced a “special military operation” on its territory after months of tensions in anticipation of an invasion.
Following the invasion, US President Joe Biden said that Vladimir Putin is cut off from the rest of the world and wants to revive the former Soviet Union.
“He has much bigger ambitions than Ukraine. He wants, in fact, to re-establish the former Soviet Union. That’s what it’s all about. And I think his ambitions are completely contrary to where the rest of the world has come.”