War and Peace in Europe from Hitler to Putin

- The best part of a year is now passed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February. The imbalance between the two countries in military strength was striking. You can see here the Russians with or who are in red, hugely outnumber Ukrainians In yellow there, vastly more personnel, although they've now called up even more, greater resources in artillery, war planes, helicopters, massively greater defense budget. Ukraine only has one submarine, although they are of course, they have access to the the Black Sea. Russia has 63 and so on. And I haven't even covered nuclear resources. The Russians invaded from the north and the south and the east. They advanced from areas they'd already been occupying since 2014. But they met with unexpectedly tough resistance. Equipment was destroyed or seized by Ukrainians. These are points of the invasion and Russian strikes, artillery and air strikes. And you can see it's on the north, east and the south. But a lot of Russian armor has been bogged down, has been destroyed or seized by the Ukrainians. He's one of the famous picture of Ukrainian farmer pulling away a Russian armored vehicle. Here's the famous column of troops and armor advancing on the capital city Kiev from the north, which was brought to a halt and forced to disperse. It was 40 miles long at one point, threatening the capital city but without success/ Putin, President Putin of Russia, was forced to abandon his attack on Kiev and focused instead on the southeast. They'd, the Russians, in other words, the Russian bear here in this cartoon, had bitten off more than it could chew. Conflict continues in the southeast and the east. And Russian forces went over to continuing and largely indiscriminate artillery and aerial bombardment causing huge damage to civilian areas. And of course while the Russian invasion caused a huge displacement of population, people fleeing in terror from the bombardment and the bombing and the artillery attacks, not just from the eastern areas but also from other parts of the country as well. While the Russians continue to consolidate their position in the Eastern Donbass region, they've also been driven back by Ukrainian counter attack. And all of this, it's still going on, of course, shows I think that the Russians have abandoned their original expectation of conquering the entire country in a short space of time. We are in a conflict, which as in World War I, the defense seems to have the upper hand. The war of attrition, in which neither side is made much progress. Ukraine is fighting on its own territory, but is exceeding and destroying bases and supplies across the border. And so this is a conflict that is dragging on. I think expectations of a swift Ukrainian victory are probably misplaced. But clearly at the moment they have the upper hand. It's not just a regional conflict, it's having global effects. The enormous outflow of refugees and displaced people from Ukraine over 6 million by this summer, has had a massive impact on Eastern European economies in particular. And Ukraine famously, is the bread basket of Europe, so called. It was effectively blockaded for several months, not to mention the damage done to its agriculture by the war. Many countries depend to a considerable degree on Ukrainian produce for their food supplies. Supplies have been interrupted, excuse me, and prices driven up. Here, it's a surprising list. Wheat imports, for example, sourced from the Ukraine. Mulled over next door you might expect but Lebanon, Qatar, Tunisia, Libya, the Middle Eastern countries, even Pakistan, are heavily dependent on wheat from Ukraine. And 42% of global exports of sunflower oil come from Ukraine. So no wonder it's having this kind of, knock on effect all over the world. And of course, Russia's oil and natural gas resources have been vital in supplying other European countries, particularly Germany. And the blockade of Russian trade with retaliatory measures led, it's been the major factor and a massive hike in energy prices which we're all suffering from. There've been some small successes in negotiating resumption of grain and food exports from Ukraine. But the situation is still particularly bad. And it's quite clear that food is using gas and oil supplies as a weapon in order to try and persuade the countries which depend heavily on Russian energy supplies to put pressure on Ukrainians to come to negotiate a settlement. NATO countries, especially Germany, have been forced to reexamine their defense policies, increase their expenditure on arms. Russia has depleted its resources of manpower and material and it's increasingly dependent on out of date military equipment. It's called up 300,000 more men to the armed forces, but it's clear that some resistance to that and also it's pretty indiscriminate. They're not the kind of veterans and experienced troops that is sometimes been claimed by Russian state controlled media. So how effective the call out remains to be seen. There is of course fighting on territory that's defended strongly by the Ukrainians and there have been problems of morale and commitment on the part of the Russian forces, particularly young conscripts. Ukraine is almost entirely reliant on advanced weaponry supplied from outside. And this carries within a serious risk of the war escalating as the Russians have so far failed to cut off these supplies. So all in all, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has caused the most serious crisis in world politics for many years. And you sometimes see people saying, this is the first war in Europe since 1945. But of course that ignores the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. But those, although they cause considerable concern and some intervention on the part of the Western powers were essentially local or regional conflicts. This goes far beyond that. Well, so far, so familiar, you probably know most of that. Every day we've been del used with information about the latest situation. In an age of 24/7 news media, the dramatic events have been on our screens day and night. There's no excuse for not knowing what's going on. What I want to do this evening is to produce some historical perspectives on this. What are the long term factors, if any, behind the conflict? Are there any historical parallels? Do we have any reason to believe the conflict can be resolved? If we do, when and how? History mobilized into propaganda on both sides has played a major part in reporting the conflict. How accurate is the history we are being shown? What exactly is new about the present war? Well, kind of back to basics. So let me begin by reminding you of where Ukraine is and where it's been over the past centuries. A more complicated question you might think. To begin with, Ukraine has not been an independent sovereign state for very long. In the early modern period, so the 17th, 18th centuries, Ukraine began to emerge from the breakup of a large, now largely forgotten state. the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. To most of the 18th Century and the 19th Century in particular, Ukraine was part of Czarist Russia. Then with the Bolshevik Revolution, which overthrew the Czar, there was a brief civil war after which Ukraine became part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Can see there the acquisition in the 18th Century in particular, of territories which then were incorporated Ukraine. But then, following the first World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, you can see how it began to constitute itself in a civil, serious civil conflict before it was absorbed by Soviet Russia. In World War ii, Ukraine changed hands again. Most of the western part was under German occupation from 1941 to 1944. And then we have the Reichkommissariat of Ukraine indeed, part of the Nazi empire in Eastern Europe. In 1945, of course, when Hitler was defeated, the Soviet Army's occupied Berlin and the eastern part of Germany. It was back under Soviet control. In 1954, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, seeded the Crimea to Ukraine. He'd actually been the the Soviet commissar in Ukraine before and after the war. And since then, Putin's Russia has reabsorbed the area along with parts of southeastern Ukraine, that was never actually internationally recognized or hasn't been up to now. So, what are the historical roots and antecedents of the present conflict? Almost as soon as Vladimir Putin and his forces invaded Ukraine, political pundits and parts of the media began comparing him with Hitler. Both men imposed dictatorial rule over their respective countries. Both men suppressed dissent and eliminated independent media. Both men had no hesitation in murdering people they considered a threat to their rule. Both hit there and Putin invaded a series of neighboring countries. Both used lies and disinformation to justify their actions. More strikingly perhaps, both used a symbol, in Putin's case Z and of course, in Hitler's the Swastika to advertise support for their aims. Both men had no hesitation in causing death and destruction on a massive scale to further their end. Jonathan Katz, the Washington based director of the Democracy Initiatives has said and I quote,"Putin is this Century's equivalent to Hitler. Putin's character," he says,"disturbingly mirrors the traits of Hitler. For me, the former Director of US National Intelligence, James Clapper, has told CNN,'Putin is a 21st Century Hitler,' phrase used by variety of commentators ranging from the former Irish Taoiseach, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar to the Ukrainian Minister of Defense." British Liberal Democrat politician, Norman Baker, has claimed in a Daily Mail,"Everything Vladimir Putin does," he says, "echoes Adolf Hitler." Even the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, speaking to a Jewish holocaust survivor in Canada 2014 after the Russian invasion of Crimea said,"Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler." Critics of the West's cautious approach to Putin's territorial aggrandizements routinely invoke parallels with the Munich Agreement in 1938, in which Britain and France sought to appease Hitler and avoided general war by forcing Czechoslovakia to give in to the Nazi dictators demands for a long chunk of its own territory. Now of course, as Jewish groups in particular pointed out, Putin has not established extermination camps or gas chambers as Hitler did to carry out the mass murder of European Jews. But Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky had directly called the indiscriminate bombardment of his country's major towns and cities by the Russians as a genocide. Poland's President, Andrzej Duda has echoed this asserting,"The Russian invasion bears," as he says,"the features of genocide. It aims at eliminating and destroying a nation. The mounting evidence of indiscriminate massacres of civilian men, women and children and atrocities, including torture by the Russian armies as they retreat in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns is impossible to ignore or despite absurd a Russian efforts to do so explain away. So in my view, this is genocide. These people are being killed because they are Ukrainians and not for any other reason." And of course, genocide was at the heart of the Nazi project. This year, the summer sees the 80th anniversary of the Nazi's general plan for the east, a proposal for the mass murder by disease, starvation, neglect and extermination through labor as they call it, of up to 45 million Slavs in order to make way for German settlement across East-central and Eastern Europe. And its final version completed in June, 1940 to this official policy of the Nazi regime and the document which came to light in 1957, laid bear the full extent of the most radical genocidal program ever Dem devised. Over the next 30 years from 1942 when it became official German government policy, assuming of course the German victory in the war, the Nazis proposed to liquidate as the euphemism was, 50% of Latvians, Estonians, Czechs, 75% of Bela-Russians, 85% of Lithuanians and Poles. Ukrainians were to disappear altogether, 35% deemed racially suitable by the Nazis were to be Germanized, the rest were to be eliminated. That gives you an idea of the the plan, of the future government of the former Russian territories, East European territories was to happen. Of course, the plan never had a chance of becoming reality, but the genocidal attitude towards the millions the Nazi, regardless as Slav subhumans, on to mention, found expression in the killing of thousands of Polish intellectuals and his deliberate starvation of more than 3 1/4 million Red Army soldiers taken prisoner by the German forces pended a huge enclosures on the open European, East European step, left to die without food, shelter or medication. Anyone who thinks the Ukrainians are Nazis or that Stalin was the principal enemy of the Ukrainians and other inhabitants of east and central Europe in the war needs to read this shocking document. Of course, Stalin also, ordered the shooting of some 40,000 Polish officers captured when the Red Army took over Eastern Poland in fulfillment of the infamous Nazi Soviet or Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, signed in August, 1939. And they deported thousands of mainly upper class Poles to Serbia, Siberia, sorry. But these terrible crimes were committed in the name of class warfare rather than ethnic hatred. For the victims of course, it's made little difference. But the almost unimaginable scale of the general plan for the East, really does, I think put it in a category of its own. The Nazis genocidal intentions went far beyond the elimination of so-called subhumans who stood in the way of German settlement. Genocide comes in many varieties and degrees. And the mass murder by Nazi of nearly 6 million European Jews was qualitatively different in my view, from the vast extermination program contained in the General Plan for the east. From the very beginning, the Jews were, for the Nazis, the world enemy, volksfeind, dedicated to destroying Germany and the Germans in a huge global conspiracy aimed at ruling the world. Hitler believed every Jew was predestined by their racial character to work towards this end. Nazi wartime propaganda showed the three most powerful enemies of Germany, the British Empire, Soviet Union, the United States of America being steered from behind by malevolent Jewish conspirators."Behind the enemy powers," it says, "the Jew." Now this absurd but conspiratorial fantasy lent the German invaders of East European of countries and areas to go out of their way to degrade and humiliate the Jewish inhabitants of the area, forcing Jewish elders to dance in the town square so they collapse from exhaustion, Jewish girls to clean latrines with their blouses, committing similar atrocities too revolting to detail. It was this belief that caused the Nazis to try and eliminate the Jewish population of Europe in the quickest way possible. In contrast to the much longer term mass extermination planed for the region's Slavs in the general plan for the east, who were seldom treated with a grotesque and elaborate sadism reserved for the Jews. So in the light of these facts, few things in Vladimir Putin's propaganda seem more absurd than his claim that Ukraine is ruled by a clique of Nazis, not at least of course, because the Ukrainian President Zelensky is himself Jewish. That's not to say that there are not or never have been Nazis or fascists in Ukraine. In particular, a wartime partisan leader in Ukraine, Stepan Bandera had fought against the Soviet Union's invasion of Ukraine, was deeply antisemitic and had ties to the Nazi, hence the Russian claim and Russian propaganda that they've invaded Ukraine to combat what they call banderas. There is a far right in Ukraine and to its members, Bandera is a hero. There he is in a demonstration. One element in the Ukrainian military resistance to the Russian invasion. the Azov Battalion has its roots in an independent ultra right pro-Nazi paramilitary movement. There they are. And you can see that again, the use of a fascist style symbol. For these men, the Russians are the true enemy most of all because of the deliberately induced famine in Ukraine of the early 1930s. And many on the Ukrainian right, including the pro-western government in power a few years ago, have tried to give the famine equal status with the holocaust by providing it with a similar name Holodomor and claiming its victims numbered 6 million or even more. Since the war began however, the Ukrainian government has taken steps to swamp the neo Nazi element in the Azov Battalion. It's now reckoned to be about 20%. And of course, that's only one small part of the Ukrainian armed forces. Because the Ukrainian fight for democracy, it's important to remember, is at the core of the resistance to the Russians. It's a fight for the Ukrainian people's right of self-determination, the their rights to decide their own future. It's a fight against the regime in Russia that has extinguished democracy and crushed civil rights, free expression, independent news media and all political opposition. Putin looks back to World War II as a model for the war against Ukraine. And he bases it on an appeal to Russian patriotism. He's sanitized all aspects of the Russian past from Czarism to Stalinism in his bid to boost patriotic sentiment and by extension, support for himself of course. And his regime in Russia had merged the end of the 1990s out of the unrestrained greed of the transition from communism to capitalism after the fall of the Berlin War. A transition that created the billionaires we now know is oligarchs. It's an ultra capitalist regime, it's a kleptocracy that's corrupt to the core and it's a system that found imitation in the corruption that riddled the Ukrainian political system after independence. It's still very much present though at the moment, it's been paused, forced to take a back seat as a struggle for survival against Russia dominates everything. There's a capitalism crushing the Ukrainian national identity. Unlike Hitler, Putin doesn't think of Ukrainians as subhumans who have no right to remain alive, let alone a malignant global threat to the existence of his country as Hitler consider the Jews to be. In fact, he thinks of them as Russians. On 18th of March, 2014, celebrating the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, he declared, "Russians and Ukrainians are one people.""Kyiv," he went on harking back to the Middle Ages,"is the mother of Russian cities." In February, 2020. Putin repeated his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one and the same people as he said. He alleges that Ukrainian national identity was a creation of maligned foreign influences, particularly NATO."There was," he said, "no Ukrainian state. It was a fiction. And it followed that apart from a tiny minority of Nazis," as he called them, "who ruled them. Ukrainians would welcome the Russians with open arms," as they liberated them from what was essentially in Putin's eyes foreign occupation. So, Russian regulatory conscripts were not prepared in advance for the invasion. They were quickly disillusioned as they encountered unexpectedly stiff resistance. Since the invasion, they've only made slow progress and they've been beaten back in some areas. Civilians in occupied towns and villages have come out with Ukrainian flags to demonstrate against them. Artillery bombards and air strikes have inflicted massive damage on the physical infrastructure, physical fabric of many Ukrainian towns and cities. But they don't seem to have weakened Ukrainian resistance. If anything, they have strengthened it. And of course the idea that the Ukrainians are Russians is belied by this linguistic map of Ukraine. And the swift, the intended swift occupation of the entire country, followed by the rapid removal of Zelensky and his replacement by Russian puppet, which is Putin's original aim, has not been realized. This is a military and political defeat of humiliating proportions for Putin's regime. Russian forces have recognize this embarrassing reality and have withdrawn from central Ukraine to consolidate their position in the east. And here the task is a bit easier perhaps. If you look at this linguistic map, you'll see that the eastern provinces are dominated by Russians speakers as the red part there. In the central and western parts, it's Ukrainian speakers who dominate. Ukrainian is not a dialect of Russian. It's a separate language. It's more closely related to Bela-Russian with a distinct grammar and spelling, which we've actually all learned in the last months by spelling Kyiv, the Ukrainian way, K-Y-I-V rather than K-I-E-V, the Russian way and Odessa with one s and so on. As a result of decades of domination by Russia, many if not most Ukrainians can speak Russian, but there's no doubt they have a distinctive cultural identity, an identity that Putin is determined to obliterate in the eastern provinces by holding, for example, rigged plebiscites just the last few days where no doubt 99% of the voters will opt to join Russia recognizing their essential Russianess. If you believe that, of course, you believe anything. Now as here, if anything, that the parallel with Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union can be found, For Hitler, also expected this swift and easy victory as he sent his armies. More than three and a half million men with thousands of tanks, self-propelled guns, armored vehicles, combat aircraft and artillery, across the border of Nazi occupied Poland on the 22nd of June 1941. So convent was Hitler that the entire edifice of the Soviet Society, which he conceived of as a vast mass of ignorance and subhuman peasants ruled by a tiny clique of manipulative, but unpopular Jewish bolsheviks would collapse that he didn't even bother to equip the troops with winter clothes. At first, his confidence seemed to be justified. Along a thousand mile front, the German and allied armies, Italians, Hungarians and so on, Romanians, advanced at breakneck speed in circling and capturing or killing hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers."Hitler and his generals are euphoric. That's really not saying too much." Franz Halder, the Chief of the German Army Supreme Command, noted in his diary the 3rd of July 1941."If I claim that the campaign against Russia has been won in 14 days." But Halder and his master had miscalculated. As Ukrainian peasants greeted the invading troops with the traditional welcome offerings of bread and salt, expecting liberation for the horrors of Stalin's rule, they were met with more horrors as the Germans looted and burned their way through the countryside, reduced towns to rubble and met even minor act of resistance with mass executions and the torching of entire villages. Hitler's illusions were very similar to Putin's in that respect. His German troops in 1941 burning a Ukrainian village. Thousands and thousands of such scenes were repeated right across the area of conflict. And soon heartened by Stalin's abandonment of Bolshevik rhetoric to call on people to fight the Germans in a patriotic spirit, partisan groups were springing up everywhere. Stalin's generals mobilized military reserves and brought them to the front. By early August, General Halder was confessing in his diary,"We have underestimated the Russian colossus. This, unlike the Germans, seemed to have limitless reserves of men and equipment. Reinforcement kept on arriving to take the place on the battle front of the hundreds of thousands captured or killed." And of course, the behavior of the German occupying forces the army and the SS was so violent and so murderous that Russians civilian and military rallied to the flag'cause they really saw no alternative. It's the only way they could think of surviving. And worse was to come. When the autumn rains arrived, their eyes became bogged down in oceans of mud. Soon, the Russian winter was beginning to bite with temperatures plunging to 40 degrees below zero. Such as Hitler's over weaning confidence born of the continuing contempt for the Slavs that he ignored all these problems."Never before," he claimed on the 8th of November, 1941,"has a giant empire been smashed and struck down in a short time than Soviet Russia." Well he was living in a fantasy world. His troops were tired after months of continuing advance, they were illiquid for a winter campaign. Their numbers were depleted by continual counter attacks launched by the Red Army, disaster loomed. And when the Soviet General Georgy Zhukov, bringing fresh reserves across from the east where the Japanese had turned towards the Pacific away from Russia, launched a counter attack. The Germans are forced back. In the terrible winter conditions, they began to freeze to death in their thin summer uniforms. Hitler's Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, launched a massive campaign to get German civilians back home, to send winter clothing to the beleaguered army. But it was too late. Under the strain of defeat one senior German general after another suffered a heart attack or a collapse in health and resigned including Halder himself. Hitler regarded anything other than uncompromising resistance to the advancing Russians as cowardice in the face of the enemy. Any general who ordered a strategic withdrawal in the interest of preserving a life of its troops was met with instant dismissal. Furious with his senior officers, Hitler took over as Commander in Chief himself. And the following months in 1942 saw the German forces advance once more in the east, but it was a full storm. The winter of 1942 to 3, the Battle of Stalingrad sealed their fate and inaugurated a period of continuous retreat that ended only in 1945 with the Soviets occupying Berlin and Hitler committing suicide. Both Hitler and Putin have been encouraged in their deadly illusions by subordinates who have not uttered a word of criticism of their policies. This may well be because of the fear of the consequences of disagreeing with their master. Televised meeting a Putin a few months ago with his leading advisors showed him relentlessly bullying them until he got the support he wanted. As for Hitler, anyone, especially a leading general who disputed his policy of never giving an interest to the enemy, was likely to find himself cashiered from the army and without a pension. But both dictators surrounded themselves also with true believers. Men had long since surrendered any independence of judgment and just acted as a kind of echo chamber for their leaders' views. Bless you. In the cases of both Putin and Hitler ideology, Russian nationalist belief and the essentially Russian character, Ukrainians in the first case, a dogmatic conviction of the superiority of the so-called Aryan race in the second, created an overconfidence that led to humiliating military defeat. In both cases, an invasion that was supposed not to meet 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 Putin and Hitler began to project their own murderous beliefs on to those they imagined to be their enemies. Hitler and Goebbels justified the Holocaust, the mass murderer of 6 million Jews by repeatedly claiming that the Jews in their turn, were aiming to exterminate the German race. While Putin and his subordinates have justified their assault on Ukraine by repeatedly claiming that the so-called Nazis in the country's leadership were aiming to exterminate the Russians in the Donbass region in the east. But there, the resemblance ends. The judgment of speeches over the past few years, Putin who said he regards the collapse of the Soviet Union the beginning of the 1990s as a national catastrophe, Wants to recreate the Russia of his early years and reabsorb into it neighboring states that he believes have no right to an independent existence. As a particularly grown inducing pun there, but that's kind of express what he thinks that he's doing. He's evidently prepared to use any means he considers necessary to achieve its goal. Now, at the moment, at least the conflict as such seems confined to one part of Europe. The aims of invasion limited, even shrinking as Putin's abandon the idea of regime change in Ukraine and is opting for the division of the country instead. And as the breadths and depths of Ukrainian national consciousness have become clear, Putin and his troops seem to become convinced that the Nazis they claim to be fighting are not just a entirely clique, but virtually the whole people. Hence their the violence of their treatment of Ukrainians in occupied areas, the hatred that is evident in so much of what they've been doing. Still the mass murder of civilians in Ukraine 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 World War II. More importantly, perhaps 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 treat of Versailles at the end of World War I, not interested just in establishing German hegemony over the rest of the continent. His aim, as he suggested in this famous scene, from Chaplain's film, "The Great Dictator" released in 1940 suggests the kind of global reach of his ambition. Addressing his followers on the 5th November, 1930, before he came to power in the Rhinish town of Manheim after his success in September's national elections, which really brought the Nazis onto the political stage in Germany. Hitler lamented the fact that in the so-called Scramble for Africa in the 1880s, Britain and France had snapped up the lion's share, leaving only the, wait a minute. Sorry, I'm going the wrong way here. That's better. Yeah. Leaving only the leftovers as it were to the newly minted German empire founded in 1871. Here's what Hitler said in 1930,"No people had more right to the concept of ruling the world" Weltherrschaft, the German expression,"than the German people. We would've had this right and no other nation." Stormy applause."Not England, not Spain, not Holland, no other nation" he said,"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. In the first division of the world, dividing up of the world, we fell short. But we stand now," he says in 1930,"at the beginning of a new great shake up of this world.""Today," he says in 1930,"some people claim we're entering an urgent peace. But I have to say to them, 'Gentlemen, you have a poor understanding of the horoscope of our times, which points us never before, not to peace but to war.'" So here's Hitler, talking to his supporters, revealing the global scale of his ambitions three years before he came to power. For him, the invasion that 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" for so-called second book. The United States, perpetual war, war Without limit of time or space was, he believed, the only way for the Germans or Aryan to use his terminology to succeed in the struggle for existence between races for the survival of the fittest. his warped version of Darwinian ideology. It's hard to believe that sheer scale of his ambition and the sheer insanity of it, based on a racial ideology, a racist ideology that saw the Germans as vastly superior to all others. Putin aims are far more limited. He's driven by a committed and misdirected nationalism that wants to reverse the territorial settlement of the early 90s and reestablish Russia as he sees it in the ranks of the great powers. His views are based on a bizarrely twisted view of history that sees anyone who tries to frustrate them as an Nazi, to be killed just as the 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 had been betrayed by socialists and Jews who stabbed the army in the back in the first World War. And of course, actually Germany was defeated fair and square on the battlefield in both the west and the eastern in 1918. Hitler 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, as he called it, was an essential precondition of success. Putin believes that the Russian nation was betrayed by leaders who weekly abandoned integrity of the country after 1917 and again after 1989. He too is committed to reversing what he believes to be historic defeats. Genocide was the result of both sets of beliefs. The fact that Hitler's is planned and Putin's is not, doesn't take away any of the horror that's happening on the ground in Ukraine today. What has the worst response been and what should it be? Since the fall of communism in 1990, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military defensive alliance dominated by the USA, has steadily expanded eastwards. And the first obvious result of Putin's invasion of Ukraine is that it's in the process, NATO's in the process of acquiring more members. The more aggressive Russia has grown, the more necessary membership in has become. It's Russia that's provoking a response here, not as some have claimed, the other way around. There's no credence at all in the view put forward by Russian propagandists that the invasion of Ukraine is a response to the Eastwood expansion of NATO. Secondly, NATO the EU, the USA and their allies have responded by placing embargo and sanctions on the Russian economy and especially on Russian exports. Since it include many of the world's leading economies, it's obviously having a serious effect on the Russian economy, but that won't be enough to cause a general uprising against Putin and Russia. Sanctions seldom have such a dramatic effect. More serious for Putin and his regime is the defeat that his forces have encountered in Ukraine and Eastern eras of Ukraine. It's also important to note that many countries in the world support Russia, or at least are neutral, don't support the West, like China and India, two largest countries in the world in terms of population. Although that there are signs now that these countries are beginning to become impatient with Putin and realize that his aims are not going to be achieved, at least not in the short term. There's a particular problem with Europe's supplies of natural gas, which depend heavily on Russia, particularly of course in Germany. But there are other pipelines that you've sketched on this map that are also significant. It'll take some time for this dependency to be reduced, giving Putin a significant lever over European policy, especially, whereas in Germany or in more southerly states, the dependency is particularly strong. Finally, as I've already said, Ukrainian defense against Russia is heavily dependent on Western arms supplies. These have become ever more vital over time as a counterbalance to Russia's often obsolete equipment, but enormous superiority in manpower. In this way the conflict has escalated though stopped short so far of involving nuclear weapons, even so-called tactical ones. And of course to cross that threshold would be a really serious escalation with incalculable consequences. The system of international great power relations based on mutual nuclear deterrents since 1945 has so far held. On the other hand, there's no doubt that we've now entered a kind of second Cold War with Russia and to a considerable extent also China pitted against the West. And these are dangerous times indeed. Thank you very much.(audience applauding)- There are quite a few about looking at the differences in attitude between Putin and Hitler. And I'll try and put a couple of them together. First of all, how do you think they have reacted or would react or do react to failure, created failure several times during the Second World War and now Putin and the invasion of,- Yes, that's a, excuse me, a very, very interesting question. How do Putin and Hitler comparing the two, react to failure? Hitler essentially refuse to recognize failure until just the last few months. And so, his last throw was the so-called Battle of the Bulge when he gathered his forces to combat the American, British, Canadian and so on, the allies invasion of Western Europe. And there was a bulge in their line. And he tried to snap that off and completely failed. He had a kind of breakdown after that and and basically said it's all finished. He recovered his nerve to some extent and was always hoping to be rescued by some new development, whether it was so-called wonder weapons, miracle weapons, you know, the V2 rocket or that kind of thing, or whether it was by the death of Roosevelt's shortly before the end of the war, which again grasped that is a kind of last straw. Putin is not defeated in the sense that Hitler was. I mean his regime is still intact. Russia has not been invaded. It's the op opposite. So he's able much more than Hitler was to paper over defeat and to say, well, we're not being defeated. This is all going according to plan, even though we know that's not true. So it's a quite different kind of defeat, I think in that sense. Hitler's is far more final and extreme. And propaganda, of course, neither of them, public propaganda could afford to admit that they were being defeated.- Hitler, from your description, demonstrates almost nationalistic further, this racial purity belief. Russia in the form of Putin's leadership looks at least in some ways to be supporting an oligarch criminal based society. Do you think there's a difference between nationalism, racial purity on the one side and supporting this oligarch criminal financial leadership, which is there in Russia at the moment?- Yeah, less than you might think. So, Hitler wasn't really a nationalist, the only conventional sense. He was racist. He believed in the so-called Aryan race and he was generous enough to extend that categorization to Scandinavians, for example, or some of the Dutch. His vision was essentially racist. And Putin's vision as is more nationalist in fact. It's, more Russian nationalism that it accounts to some degree why Hitler was so much more radical than Putin in his treatment of other races. He really did see world history in terms of struggle between races. And he also believed, as I said, in war, conflict, as the kind of motor of toughing up, a race, his own. So that, in the longer term he was not going to see any end to conflict at all. War was going to be perpetual and universal. As I said, Putin is much more limited in his vision for Russia and its future. What he doesn't like is to see criticism of Russia and the Russians. And that's why rather stranger to us, I think, he's managed to kind of praise Stalin as well as these Czars. They're all part of the great Russian tradition, all part of Russian identity.- And do you think, I should always ask a historian about the future, shouldn't you? So, can you feel you can predict an end game here? Are we going to see the iron curtain and fall down again as the war delineates itself somewhere in the east of Ukraine? Or is he going to react as the cornered bear that people suggest?- Well, I'm very worried about predicting the future because I once published a book, a short book that said,"German reunification was never going to happen in my lifetime."(audience laughing) And that came out in August, 1989.(audience laughing) So, ever since then I've been a bit cautious. But this of course it's been a massive amount of speculation about how this is all going to end. And there are a number of different scenarios. But at the moment both sides are digging in. Negotiated certain amount does not look as if it's on the cards. If anything it's deepened. Ukrainians are clearly not going to give up until they've got all their territory back. They might be prepared to negotiate over Crimea, but certainly not the Donbass region. And Putin cannot afford to admit defeat. So one possible scenario, which has been canvased is, Putin is overthrown by a less uncompromising politician or politicians. But he is a dictator who has got a very, very tight control over the country. The only way regime like that actually ends is by being overthrown from within, so within the hierarchy. The other thing I'd like to say is that, Hitler's regime was also a regime of corruption and of capitalism, run riot, it would say regime of kleptocracy, all the leading Nazis amassed huge fortunes while claiming that they weren't. So Hitler for example, ostentatiously refused to accept his salary from the state as Vice Chancellor, but he charged royalties on the use of his image on postage stamps and made everybody buy copies of "Mein Kampf". So, you know, he was corrupt as as well. In any dictatorship, you've got no legitimate criticism, no free press, no independent police force. And the possibility of actually criticizing a regime, the dictator is so limited that it inevitably, dictatorship inevitably leads to corruption and kleptocracy.- [Audience Member] I have a two part question For Merkle, of course, spent most of her life in Eastern Germany, so she would've enabled, to term, the Russians where like, she spoke the language of course herself. And her government was really responsible for having the pipeline, bringing the fuel, in fact directly from Russia into Germany. The other part of, I don't know whether anybody actually opposed that policy or not, that I'm not sure about that, the second part of my question, and I think my memory is correct on this, but it might be wrong, that Zelenskey's predecessor banned in fact, the use of Russian in the Ukraine. This reminds me of the silliness of the British government 40 to 50 years ago banning Welsh in fact, on street signs and direction signs and so forth. Do you think one or both of those were important initial conditions for Putin in fact to launch his invasion of the Ukraine?- Well, what we're, excuse me. What we're really talking about here, of course is the Western reaction. And I think the German dependency on Russian particularly natural gas supplies is partly of course as he suggested, a product of the relations between, the personal relations between Merkle and Putin. Merkle grew up in East Germany, speaks Russian. Putin was a KGB agent in Germany and speaks German. So, they were able to go on a personal level. However, you have to remember that Gerhard Schroder, her predecessor to the Social Democratic Party, and she's from the Conservative Christian Democrats, was also and has often continues to be closely involved with with the Russians. What's behind all that I think, is a feeling of the German political elite that a feeling of responsibility, even guilt in some cases, for the atrocities of Nazism and have desire to overcome these. So they've been looking for friendship with those countries like Poland and Russia to whom the Nazis did such terrifying, terrible damage. And you find interestingly that in German political opinion is very divided. The old intellectuals of the older generation like Rubin Habanas for example, or Elise Sheltzer are very critical of the Ukrainian resistance. They do not want Germany to help or get involved in it in any way at all. I think that comes back from that generation's feelings of responsibility for particularly 'cause their parents' responsibility for the Second World War and the Holocaust. Younger generations are much more prepared to support the Ukrainians. And Olaf Scholz, the Social Democratic Chancellor of Germany has, I think been pushed, maybe a little reluctantly towards what the younger generation are want towards supporting the Ukrainian war effort with money and material.- [Audience Member] Thank you for an amazing presentation of history over the last 100 years. I've just finished reading a book by Tim Marshall. And he looks over the last sort of, 4,000 years of geographies globally. And I think I'm what I saying that he draws a conclusion of the Soviets, that there's a natural sort of borders around mountains and rivers that would indicate that Ukraine sort of naturally would fall within the Soviet sphere influence because of natural borders, let alone buffeting from what's happened war wise over the last 4,000 years between other civilizations and the Russian Empire.- Yeah, there's kind of geopolitical view. I'm very skeptical, I have to say. There are many, many examples of countries that extend beyond natural boundaries or share an area delineated by natural boundaries like rivers or mountains with other nationalities. As well, the same as the idea that a nation is defined by its linguistic homogeneity, in which case what do you do with Switzerland, for example, or even the previous questionnaire mentioned Wales and the Welsh. And again, it's linguistic. Well Welsh language exists. And incidentally, my parents were punished in school for speaking Welsh as well. So, these nations are a product of history above all else. And there's a mixture in them of many different factors. Geography is one certainly, but of the linguistic history and public memory, it's a very complicated business. And every time you try to look at, try and define what is a nation, you run up against a lot of problems.- [Audience Member] My question is, the Donbass region in Ukraine had Russian speaking supporters at the beginning of the war or before. You know, this particular situation, has that changed in public opinion amongst the Russian supporters in Donbass now?- Yes, you can't draw a neat dividing line between Russian speakers in Ukraine supporting Putin and Ukrainian speakers supporting Zelensky. There are quite a large, substantial number of Russian speakers in Ukraine who would prefer to live in a democracy rather than a dictatorship. They prefer to live in Ukraine rather than in Russia. And we've seen the damage inflicted, violent war crimes committed by the Russians in occupied areas. Incidentally, little known fact, it's completely irrelevant, but Donbass industrial regions was founded by Welshman,(audience laughing) Mr. Hughes, who was invited over by, in the 19th Century with his team of Welch miners to start up coal mining there. And was a great success by the local aristocratic landowner. And Donetsk was originally called Yozovka, named after Hughes, before it then was taken over by the Bolsheviks and became Stalino, which for obvious reasons they changed that name as well later on. So it's gone through a number of incarnations. But the Donbass region is very important, the most important industrial area of Ukraine. And that's one reason why it's being fought over so bitterly.- I'm afraid we're going to have to stop there. You could go on answering questions all night, I'm absolutely sure. But ladies and gentlemen, could we thank Sir Richard Evans for history.(audience applauding)