War with Russia in Ukraine is a failure to heed the lessons of history

“We had to sleep on the ground and local people would come and bring us bread that they would throw over the wall to us,” Maria told me after we met up in her home village of Triokhizbenka in the Luhansk Oblast of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine.

Her neighbour, Nadezhda Zhurova, too had similar memories from that time. She, likewise, could never forget the constant gnawing hunger and pleading with her mother for a morsel of the bread that the war had made so scarce.

It’s more than seven years ago now since I met both these elderly women as they lived in the shadow of war and under bombardment close to the so-called Line of Control that separated Ukrainian forces from pro-Russian separatists dug in just a few miles away.

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But the war that they spoke of that day was not the one they were living through right there and then in the Donbas. Instead, the memories they were recounting came from another conflict, one that had ended some 70 years earlier – the Second World War.

Both Maria and Nadezhda were both around 12 years old when the Nazis trundled into eastern Ukraine. Hearing them tell of those terrible times and the subsequent decades they spent in the icy political grip of the Cold War, I couldn’t help thinking how sad the cruel twist of fate was that had left these women and others of their generation hunkered down in basements as once more shells fell on their homes.

Fast forward to today, and once again tanks and troops are trundling across eastern Ukraine. Not Nazis this time, but Russian troops, forces from the same country that back in those years of the Second World War fought bravely and paid a terrible human price in facing off against the authoritarian ambitions of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

One must be careful in making comparisons between Hitler and Russian president Vladimir Putin – not that this has stopped many politicians and commentators from doing so of late.

We here in the West must be careful, too, in condemning Russia and its people for those acts currently being perpetrated against Ukraine by Putin and his Kremlin cabal, who think nothing of riding roughshod over the rights and wishes of many of their own citizens, never mind those of other states.

Not that Putin of course regards Ukraine as anything other than part of the Russkiy Mir, or Russian world. For him, the “reunification” of that world, one in which he was immersed for years as a KGB officer during the Soviet era, is part of a great historic task.

For Putin, his military campaign in Ukraine embodies an act of re-creation. It’s a wholly justifiable move in his view to bring “home” Ukrainians to the community from which they were riven when the Soviet Union expired.

And this is where there are eerie and unsettling echoes of the past. For, in stirring the restiveness of separatists in the two breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, it’s hard not to see certain parallels with Hitler’s own use of separatists in the shape of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland back in 1938.

But it’s not just with the Nazi era that parallels can be drawn. We have been here before too under Soviet communist rule, as in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 when the tanks were sent in to crush those audacious enough to defy the Kremlin’s will.

Putin is a man out of kilter with his time.

It was just after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 that former German chancellor Angela Merkel once described him as a leader using 19th-century methods in the 21st century. Merkel, whose own upbringing of course took place in communist East Germany, knows a thing or two about the political DNA of a leader like Putin. For here is a man comfortable in the realm of confrontation and aggressive nationalism, but out of step with a world increasingly desirous of embracing the international rule of law.

But the parallels between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the past, especially Germany and Sudetenland, don’t end there. For we here in the West too appear caught in a time warp as an uncertain and divided alliance lacks the real bite and conviction to help Ukraine defend its national territory, just as Britain and France left the Czechs to their fate at Munich in 1938.

If indeed Putin, as the US and British governments warn, is poised to start “the biggest war in Europe since 1945” by launching a much more extensive invasion of Ukraine beyond the Donbas – and perhaps to the capital Kyiv itself – the UK especially seems toothless in its response. Those sanctions so far announced by the Tory government won’t even begin to make a man like Putin think again, let alone force him onto the back foot. As ever with this UK Government, it’s all a case of too little, too late. Then again, I suppose it does take time for a ridiculously incompetent, ill-equipped, and corrupt government like that of Boris Johnson’s (above) to distinguish the difference between benefactor and predator when it comes to those Russian oligarchs using the UK capital and Britain’s Overseas Territories as a financial laundromat.

Yes, care does need to be taken when drawing comparisons between Hitler and Putin – but there’s no getting away from the fact that like the German dictator in 1938, the Russian leader is exploiting careless rhetoric that ignores the fact that ethnicities do not tidily coincide with national boundaries.

And so, we have it. The tanks and troops are once more on the move in Europe. Just like Maria Goncharova and Nadezhda Zhurova who survived the Second World War and the start of the conflict in the Donbas in 2014, the spectre of war looms looms over the lives of a new generation of Ukrainians.

The world, meanwhile, having seemingly learned nothing from history, looks on.