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.
This is true, but the way was clearly paved. This war was not "classic 20th century imperialiasm", relativizing the German crimes is still wrong in my opinion.