Any comparison of anyone to Hitler is fraught with danger. Hitler is usually viewed as an almost unique figure of evil personified.

Nevertheless it is appropriate to ask if Putin is something like Europe’s 21st Century Hitler. If he is even close to a Hitler, will the Western world learn from its appeasement of Hitler in 1938 when he could have been stopped?

Putin, at age 70, had his Russian forces invade Ukraine, a sovereign country, one year ago as the first step in an attempt to recreate a Russian Empire.

Ever since 2014 when he grabbed Crimea from a weak Ukraine, in the name of protecting Russian speaking people in Ukraine, Putin has planned to annex all of Ukraine in the guise of restoring Ukraine, in his demented mind, to its rightful owner, Russia.

After Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, his Nazi Government looked to Eastern Europe as their “manifest destiny.” For example in 1936 Hitler spoke of the “incalculable farmlands” of the Ukraine.

Hitler’s first takeover of territory was the annexation of Austria into Germany in March 1938. At the end of WWI and the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 forbade the unification of Germany and Austria and stripped Austria of a territory, the Sudetenland, populated by mostly German speaking people, and placed it in Czechoslovakia.

Immediately after taking over Austria in 1938, Hitler demanded that the Germans take over the Sudetenland to protect the over 3,000,000 German-speaking people there.

In the textbook example of “appeasement” British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, joined by the French, signed the infamous “Munich Agreement” in September 1938, giving Hitler the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia.

Hitler then had all the proof he needed that neither France nor Great Britain would stand up to him.

The rest of the story is known as World War II.

Vladimir Putin, the ex-Soviet Union KGB agent, in 2005 claimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

In December 2021, two months before his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Putin said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the demise of “historical Russia.”

The three Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which the Soviet Union annexed in 1940, were the first Soviet Republics to declare their independence from the Soviet Union in 1990.

Other non-Asian Soviet Republics declaring their independence were Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, Moldova and Azerbaijan.

The Soviet Union had about 300,000,000 people at the time of its breakup, about the size of the United States.

The population of Putin’s Russian today is only about 143,000,000, less than half the population of the former Soviet Union.

Russia is now only the 9th most populous nation, way behind Brazil’s 212,000,000 for example.

Russia’s economy is only 11th in the world behind Italy, Canada and South Korea.

Putin wants to be remembered as the 21st Century Peter the Great, putting the Russian Empire back together.

Mainstream Republicans are publicly supporting the Biden Administration’s support of Ukraine to stop Putin’s illegal war of aggression.

Last month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that U.S. aid to Ukraine is a “direct investment” in our country’s interests and against Putin’s “war machine.”

McConnell continued: “If Putin were given a green light to destabilize Europe, invading and killing at will, the long term cost to the United States in both dollars and security risks would be astronomically higher than the miniscule fraction of our GDP that we have invested in Ukraine’s defense thus far.”

In other words, the United States and its NATO allies are showing Putin that, unlike 1938 with Hitler, there will be no appeasement of naked, brutal aggression against a sovereign nation in Europe.

The horrific, despicable crimes committed by Nazis under Hitler, resulted in the Nuremberg Trials, immediately after Germany’s defeat.

Chautauqua County’s own Robert H. Jackson, Chief Prosecutor of the Nazis at Nuremberg, said that aggression was “the supreme international crime.”

Putin, by Jackson’s standard, is guilty of the “supreme international crime.”

Partly as a result of the Nuremberg Trials establishing principles such as “aggressive war” and “crimes against humanity”, the United States and Western Europe had reason to hope that no European country would invade another sovereign European country again.

Putin has inflicted enormous, unjustified and illegal damage and death on the people of Ukraine.

History must show that instead of being a 21st Century Peter the Great, Putin is a 21st Century Hitler wannabe who was stopped by a determined Western world.

Fred Larson is a graduate of the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Yale Law School and is a retired Jamestown City Court Judge.