crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/39764949
Op-ed by Kate Turska, Co-chair of the Ukrainian Association of New Zealand (North) and the head of Mahi for Ukraine, a volunteer group based in New Zealand, supporting Ukraine and its People through advocacy.
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Germany in the 1930s descended into darkness after a failed democracy, humiliation in WWI, and a modernising but fractured society. Hitler built his regime on the wreckage of a democratic experiment. It was brutal, it was rapid, and the world was still learning what modern war and fascism looked like.
But Russia never needed to fall — it never rose. There was no functioning democracy to collapse. No civil society to co-opt. No free press to destroy — only moments of it, never sustained. From Tsarism to Bolshevism to Putinism, repression has been continuous. Genocide as a method of control (Chechens, Ukrainians, deportations of entire peoples) is well-documented. From the Holodomor famine in Ukraine, to mass deportations of Chechens and Crimean Tatars, to Human Rights Watch’s classification of Second Chechen War atrocities as crimes against humanity. Colonial expansionism, and totalitarianism are not deviations — they are the foundation of the Russian state.
Since the fall of the USSR, Russia hasn’t reformed, it has metastasised. It has tested, incrementally, the limits of the rules-based world: Moldova. Chechnya. Georgia. Syria. Ukraine. The poisoning of opponents abroad. The buying of politicians. The undermining of democratic elections. Each time, the world responded with handwringing and half-measures. So, it learned: there are no consequences.
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What makes it more dangerous than Hitler’s Germany isn’t the scale, but the context: The world today is connected, interdependent, distracted. The West has lived in an illusion of stability for 80 years. We struggle to grasp that a country can wage imperial war in the 21st century and get away with it — and that it’s happening right now.
This illusion is our biggest vulnerability.
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Part of the danger is that many in the West still don’t recognise Russia for what it is. Decades of propaganda have built powerful myths about “Russian cultural depth,” “natural spheres of influence,” and “security concerns” that supposedly justify its actions. Western narratives too often frame russia as a reactive power — a victim of geopolitics rather than a consistent imperial aggressor. This myth of russian imperial innocence, rooted in Soviet-era disinformation and reinforced by Western intellectuals who romanticised the USSR, still shapes public perception. That makes it easier for russia to present its colonial wars as defensive, and far harder for democracies to mobilise against it. The result is a warped debate, where the aggressor’s narrative is given equal weight to documented reality — and that distortion makes russia more dangerous than ever.
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We must stop operating under the logic that the world will eventually “go back to normal”, because it won’t. Not unless Russia is stopped completely. Russian war on Ukraine (which did not begin in 2022, but in 2014) is not just about Ukraine. It is about the rules of the world we live in, and Russia is rewriting them.
Whataboutism will try to distract you. “What about this country? What about that war?” But not all conflicts shape the global order. Russia’s war does.
This is why Russia must be defeated, not negotiated with, not accommodated. There’s no “solution” that preserves this regime and protects the future at the same time. The system it represents is incompatible with any stable or free international order.
This is the fight that defines whether democracy, sovereignty, human rights, the entire post-WWII system, survives, or becomes a footnote in history books no one will be allowed to read.
I think the article is heavily misinformed.
The article ignores one obvious difference that requires a different approach. Nazi Germany was not nuclearly armed. Russia is. Unlike the Soviet tanks rolling unto Berlin from the East and American tanks rolling through large parts of Western Germany, such a scenario for Moscow will not happen.
Furthermore the claim that others wars would be irrelevant for the “global order” and therefore should not be considered or compared is extremely stupid. What the author believes to be a “free world order” and its wars are as much shaped by Western imperialism, like Russias invasion of Ukraine is by Russian imperialism.
We see a reemergence of two blocs, with Russia getting unlikely allies with Iran, North Korea and China, who are less concerned about a common ideology and more about what they perceive as a common enemy. Ukraine, West Asia and South East Asia are all linked. It is in the best interest of Ukraine to delink them, which wont happen as the US made it clear that Ukraine has to play to their tune if it doesnt want to be abandoned alltogether.
To get back to the claim that Russia would be more dangerous than Nazi Germany, Nazi Germany steamrolled Poland, the Benelux countries and half of France. The population was much younger and much more militarised. Germany allied with Finland, Italy and Spain, giving it much better geographic conditions.
Meanwhile Russia seems to slowly win in Ukraine, but it seems rather unlikely that it will shurn out 20 million soldiers, tens of thousands of modern tanks, fighter jets and other equipment it currently lacks in Ukraine to invade western Europe all of a sudden.
Finally the claim of the author that the military threat by Russia would be underestimated is just wrong as the EU countries pledged to spent a trillion on upgrading their military capeabilities in the next years.
The EU and US need to expand sanctions and properly enforce them. Ukraine needs further military aid, but the only scenario in which Russia becomes more dangerous than the Nazisz is if it decides to use its nuclear arsenal. And to prevent that, it is crucial that Russia can end this war without its cities in ruins and territory occupied.
You might have some points but russia attacking west = as nuclear war and end of russian civilization the rest of the world might have chance to survival uk and usa though would fall with russia (not really a bad thing for the rest of the world) but like the same thing you said about moscow…
14:1 buddy. Unless they start gattling cannoning babbies, Russia ain’t winning