The accompanying photo is from the Siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) by the Nazis in World War II. It shows one incident of German troops’ constant terrorizing of the encircled starving, freezing residents with bombs and artillery. Hitler had ordered the city leveled, so much of this destruction was indiscriminate, with no purpose but to torment and demoralize the trapped civilian population. However, much of it was aimed at vital facilities; power generation, sanitation plants, food storage, etc.

Sound familiar? It should, for it is very largely what Russia – Putin – is now doing on a nationwide scale to Ukraine, to try to win a war he was delusional enough to assume would be easy. Instead, the Ukrainians have gallantly defended their homeland – a ‘real country’ – so now he is lashing out with frustration at a people he may have truly imagined would welcome his rampaging troops as liberators from the ‘Nazis’ he claimed now rule in Kyiv.

And here’s a truly disgusting paradox: Putin was Born in Leningrad, where this photo was taken! That was well after the Siege was over, but growing up, he must have witnessed many of its scars rebuilding, and heard many of its horror stories. An older brother died of disease due to the blockade, so Vladimir never met him.

Could there possibly be a more grotesque irony than Putin claiming he is acting to expel ‘Nazis’ from Ukraine, when he is ordering things done to its citizens in the same vein as was done to his hometown – in fact, to much of the USSR – by Hitler? Targeting life-sustaining Ukrainian public infrastructure is exactly the sort of thing the Nazis did to enemies, especially subhuman (in Nazi dogma) Russians. And can he sincerely believe that world opinion will swallow the torrent of lies he has told to rationalize his belligerence? That would be laughable were it not so monstrous.

The dissonance between Putin’s youthful experience and his current actions defies description. He is ordering harm to innocents in ways that no one with the worst siege in history in his personal background would dream of doing if he had the least conscience, decency or goodness of heart. Putin must know, first hand from survivors of the ‘Blockada,’ how hideously traumatic it is for helpless people to have military forces inflict random violence upon them.

In fact – horrifying thought – perhaps recalling that is what gave him the idea of doing such in Ukraine.

In his offenses against all that is humane, he acts as if he absorbed only the worst lessons of the ghastly crucible his elegant birthplace withstood: Life is cheap, not cherished; Make civilians suffer; Any horrific deed is acceptable to prevail; Winning is all that matters. Dear reader, make no mistake: All those attitudes were among the bedrock, guiding precepts of the Third Reich.

And this is hardly the first time Putin has echoed some tactic of Hitler who, for example, partly justified invading Poland by claiming German minorities there were being oppressed. Putin said the same of Russian speakers in Ukraine; in each case, even if true, it was/is only used as an excuse for what was/is actually a war of conquest.

But formed by his KGB service, Putin seemingly cannot comprehend acting on bases other than fear, arrogance or naked self-interest. So the Ukrainians’ patriotism and sense of national honor must baffle, as much as it enrages, him. He is willing to commit human sacrifice of Ukrainians and his own military, to achieve his fantasies of military glory and Russian ‘national greatness.’ He has been denied the quick victory he expected, so will lash out and lay waste to that whole land if he must, to appease his demons of spite, pride and megalomania, which he presents – again, laughably – as ‘strong leadership.’

Also, Putin fears (rightly) what the two-legged predators he has surrounded himself with may do to him, now that his catastrophic misjudgment has harmed their own interests so deeply. But whatever his Fate if his blatant power play fails – exile, prison or summary execution – he will absolutely have brought it upon himself. In addition to being hampered by farcical corruption, his military is floundering largely due to a primitive system of rule he created which promotes ambition and brutality, not competence. So now, his own system may devour him.

Putin and leaders like him repeatedly show that they care nothing for any harm they do in order to evade the dread status of ‘loser.’ In their view, a ‘winner’ is one willing to wreck the world if it fails to conform to his purposes. I alluded to all this in a post in March 2022, ‘A Sustaining Folly,’ which said all I felt had to be said (at that time) about Putin, including my concept of ‘Counter-Evolutionaries’: Men of barbaric, rapacious character who do not want Mankind to ‘evolve,’ to get better, wiser and kinder. They benefit from a world in which the vicious like themselves can prey, unhindered or scolded, upon the weak (yet another Hitler parallel). Thus, their actions and attitudes effectively impede improvement for us all.

(Americans should take note: Russian society evidently has no workable legal or cultural guardrails against unlimited abuse of power by those who hold it, no matter how vicious or unjust – and look where that lack has repeatedly gotten them! America, thankfully, does have limitations against anyone willing to do any amount of harm, rather than accept defeat. The rule of law – not just a pretense of it – is a defining feature of Western Civilization in general. Thus, anyone here who ignores these norms is by definition ‘uncivilized’ in every sense that really matters.)

Further, Putin seems not – dares not? – to grasp that every enormity he commits in Ukraine only proves to its citizens, and most of the world, how urgent it is to resist and thwart him. If this is how he acts when they are able to fight back, what revenge will he wreak if he conquers, disarms, and then rules them? In fact, this should be how every person on Earth who doesn’t accept that Might Makes Right judges this shameful assault and the war crimes in its course. Russian atrocities, beyond the basic offense of unprovoked attack, show that Putin feels that if he can’t make Ukrainians capitulate, he can, and will, at least make them suffer (as his ‘starving, freezing’ Leningrader neighbors did). This spectacle should stiffen the world’s resolve: Actions like his, indifferent to international order and contemptuous of peaceful resolution, must Not be allowed to triumph.

For if Putin prevails in Ukraine, what else might he do in his Hitlerian determination to re-assemble the Soviet Empire by coercion and/or brute force? Indeed, what will truculent tyrants around the world do, if they see they will eventually get their way if they are just willing to make enough blood flow? We should all hope, and help, to make the invasion of Ukraine the first, and last, contest of whether cynical autocrats and their Hubris will be allowed to run geopolitics in the 21^st Century.

So may the Ukrainians continue to show the courage and resolution that Putin’s erstwhile Leningraders did. More important: May Everyone who rejects the right of the strong to rule the weak without mercy never lose sight of how decency, honor and self-interest compel us to continue to help that victimized nation. Beyond the real possibility of Putin trying to re-absorb the Baltic states (EU/NATO members) if he subjugates Ukraine, on a far deeper scope, the entire bestial mindset he personifies must be foiled if Humanity is ever to be able to advance – to truly ‘Evolve’ – beyond our savage origins.

The success of Ukraine’s valiant opposition has a lot to do with NATO-style military reforms and organization they have adapted since Crimea was snatched in 2014 (in hindsight, an act of appeasement like the sacrifice of Sudetenland, which emboldened an aggressor to believe the West would not seriously resist him). But perhaps even moreso with Ukrainians’ willingness to die fighting Putin, rather than face hellish lives as his conquered subjects, as they endured during their previous occupation by the (actual) Nazis.

The Berlin Wall was long the fault line between the respective power of Russian Totalitarianism and of Western free individualism. The Wall fell toward the West, but that conflict is now being played out again, as Ukraine struggles mightily to complete its ongoing rejection of, and escape from, the Asiatic-style Despotism of the Kremlin.

It gratifies me to muse that the spirits of heroic Leningraders (or at least admiring memories of them) may now be inspiring the Ukrainians to hold out, reassuring them that even the most fiendish warlord doesn’t invariably win. And that they would do so in atonement for Putin, their native son, for having the diabolical effrontery to do, in Ukraine, so much of what the Nazis did to them. The people of Leningrad were largely helpless before their ferocious attackers, yet they often showed gallant defiance. Hitler exacted an unspeakable loss on the city, as Putin is doing on a far wider scale, but Hitler lost and Leningrad was delivered. Perhaps that will happen again, only this time without the survivors being saved from a foreign villain, then falling back into the claws of a domestic one like Stalin. Or in the case of Putin, ‘Stalin-like.’

That’s only my fantasy of course, but it would be an irony wonderful enough to offset the ‘grotesque’ one of Putin claiming that he is fighting the Nazis in Ukraine. As opposed to the implacable reality that he is fighting ‘Like’ the Nazis, in Ukraine.