'For Hitler, the invasion of the Soviet Union was only a step in the direction of world domination, as its vast resources would form the basis of even further invasions, including ultimately – as he hinted in his unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf – the US. Perpetual war was, he believed, the only way for the Germans – Aryans, to use his terminology – to succeed in the struggle for existence between races for the survival of the fittest.
Putin’s aims are far more limited. He is driven by a committed and misdirected nationalism that wants to reverse the territorial settlement of the early 1990s and re-establish Russia in the ranks of the great powers. And they are based on a bizarrely twisted view of history that sees anyone who tries to frustrate them as a “Nazi”, to be killed just as Nazis were by the Red Army in the Second World War.
Both Hitler and Putin are consumed by a deeply held ideology rooted in false memories of world war. Hitler believed that the German nation was betrayed by socialists and Jews who stabbed the army in the back during the First World War. He was committed from the outset to reversing that defeat and resuming Germany’s “grasp for world power”, though on a far larger scale than before; and eliminating the “Jewish world-enemy” was a precondition of success. Putin believes that the Russian nation was betrayed by leaders who abandoned its integrity after 1917 and again after 1989. He too is committed to reversing what he imagines to be historic defeats. Genocide is the result in both cases. The fact that Hitler’s was planned, and Putin’s is not, does not take anything away from the horror of what is happening in Ukraine today.''
The Russian president is a prisoner of his own delusions – and the similarities with Hitler are hard to ignore...
Both Hitler and Putin were encouraged in their deadly illusions by subordinates who did not utter a word of criticism of their policies. This may well be because of fear of the consequences of disagreeing. The televised meeting of Putin with his leading advisers in late February showed him bullying them until he got the support he wanted. As for Hitler, anyone who disputed his policy of never giving an inch to the enemy was likely to find himself cashiered from the army and deprived of his pension. Both dictators surrounded themselves with true believers, men who had long since surrendered any independence of judgement and simply acted as an echo chamber for their leader’s views.
In the cases of both Putin and Hitler, ideology – a nationalist belief in the essentially Russian character of Ukrainians in the first case, a dogmatic conviction of the superiority of the “Aryan” race in the second – created an overconfidence that led to a humiliating military defeat. In both cases, an invasion that was supposed not to encounter any serious resistance turned into a disaster. In both cases a dictator acted on ideologically driven assumptions that quickly turned out to be false. Both Hitler and Putin projected their own murderous beliefs on to those they imagined to be their enemies: Hitler and Goebbels justified the Holocaust by claiming that the Jews were aiming to exterminate the German race, while Putin and his subordinates have justified his assault on Ukraine by claiming that the “Nazis” in the country’s leadership were aiming to exterminate the Russians in the eastern Donbas region.
But there the resemblance ends. To judge from his speeches over the past few years, Putin, who regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as a national catastrophe, wants to recreate the Russia of his early years and absorb into it neighbouring states that he believes have no right to their independent status. He is evidently prepared to use any means he considers necessary to achieve his goal. At the moment at least, the conflict seems confined to one part of Europe and the aims of the invasion are limited, even shrinking: Putin apparently has abandoned the idea of regime change in Ukraine and is opting for the division of the country instead.
As the breadth and depth of Ukrainian national consciousness have become clear, Putin and his troops have decided that the “Nazis” they claim to be fighting are not just a tiny clique but virtually the whole people. Still, the mass murder of civilians seems to be a product of defeat and retreat; it was not planned in advance, unlike the mass murder of Ukrainians and other “Slavs” by the invading Germans in the Second World War.
Hitler’s aims, in contrast to Putin’s, were not confined to one corner of Europe. He was never interested in merely reversing the territorial settlement achieved by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919; not interested just in establishing German hegemony over the rest of the continent. Addressing his followers on 5 November 1930, after his stunning success in September’s national elections, Hitler lamented that in the “scramble for Africa” in the 1880s, Britain and France had taken the lion’s share, leaving only the leftovers to the newly minted German empire:
“No people had more right to the concept of ruling the world [[i]Weltherrschaft[/i]] than the German people. We would have had this right, and no other nation [stormy applause]. Not England and not Spain, not Holland, no other nation could have had an inborn right on the basis of its energy and competence, and also its numerical strength, to claim the domination of the world… Today, some people claim that we are entering an age of peace, but I have to say to them: Gentlemen, you have a poor understanding of the horoscope of our times, which points as never before not to peace, but to war.”
For Hitler, the invasion of the Soviet Union was only a step in the direction of world domination, as its vast resources would form the basis of even further invasions, including ultimately – as he hinted in his unpublished sequel to
Mein Kampf – the US. Perpetual war was, he believed, the only way for the Germans – Aryans, to use his terminology – to succeed in the struggle for existence between races for the survival of the fittest.
Putin’s aims are far more limited. He is driven by a committed and misdirected nationalism that wants to reverse the territorial settlement of the early 1990s and re-establish Russia in the ranks of the great powers. And they are based on a bizarrely twisted view of history that sees anyone who tries to frustrate them as a “Nazi”, to be killed just as Nazis were by the Red Army in the Second World War.
Both Hitler and Putin are consumed by a deeply held ideology rooted in false memories of world war. Hitler believed that the German nation was betrayed by socialists and Jews who stabbed the army in the back during the First World War. He was committed from the outset to reversing that defeat and resuming Germany’s “grasp for world power”, though on a far larger scale than before; and eliminating the “Jewish world-enemy” was a precondition of success. Putin believes that the Russian nation was betrayed by leaders who abandoned its integrity after 1917 and again after 1989. He too is committed to reversing what he imagines to be historic defeats. Genocide is the result in both cases. The fact that Hitler’s was planned, and Putin’s is not, does not take anything away from the horror of what is happening in Ukraine today.'
- Richard J Evans,
Why Putin’s war in Ukraine turned into a military disaster, April 20, 2022
Context(Russia's war of brutality) - 'There's little denying at this point that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been an unmitigated military and economical disaster..'(Cult of the dead) - The problem: [the] imperial structure of Russia and .. its imperialist mindset