Since before the aggression of Ukraine, the transversal party of “we must distinguish” and “we must not confuse”, in addition to denying the evidence of the facts of an invasion planned for months, has denied the validity and legitimacy of any possible parallel between what Adolf Hitler had obtained in Munich in 1938 and what Vladimir Putin wanted to obtain from the heads of state and government that he forced humiliating pilgrimages to the Kremlin table: the legitimacy of his claims on Ukraine.
Instead, that comparison, apparently so naive and so abused, with the passing of the days shows itself more and more exact and pertinent. Not only because the massacres of civilians and the Chechenization of the war have reported the Nazi (and Stalinist, to remain in the ideological vicinity of Putinism) horror, but above all because the nature of that trap that Putin imagines for Europe has all the characteristics of the one in which France and Germany ended in 1938: an agreement for a provisional peace, in the interstices of permanent war.
When Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier returned to their homeland after the Munich Pact they were welcomed as triumphs and saviors of peace. But things, as is well known, went in another direction, proving Churchill right: the dishonor of surrender would not have averted but legitimized the aggression against the French and English democracies.
Some historiographical readings on the reasons forappeasement they justify the pacifist choice, arguing that France and England would in any case have had no escape against the overwhelming German military power and therefore the green light for Nazism to the east would have at least delayed German expansionism to the west. Without entering into the interpretative diatribes on that fatal decision, it is important to note how, admitting the validity of a more indulgent reading towards Chamberlain and Daladier, the comparison between theappeasement made at the time with Hitler and the one hoped for today with Putin and therefore the judgment on the responsibility of those who call peace the trophy to be delivered to the aggressor of the Kremlin is still aggravated. And it is a question, in this case, of a judgment that is aggravated not only, so to speak, by the similarities, but also by the differences between the two capitulations.
Let’s start with the similarities. As in 1938, even today the alibi of aggression is represented by the need to protect national minorities discriminated against or persecuted in third countries: the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, the Russians of Donbass in Ukraine. As in 1938 for the Germans, the choice of an ethno-nationalist paradigm allows the Russians today to open new fronts everywhere in the former Soviet empire. There were Germans everywhere in Eastern Europe to justify the claims of the Reich and there are Russians and Russian speakers almost everywhere in the countries emancipated from Moscow rule after the collapse of the USSR.
The other evident similarity between the Munich of that time and the one implored now is the difficulty of safeguarding stable political and territorial balances for democracies forced to compete with an undemocratic and ideologically expansionist antagonist, rather than militarily imperialistic. The Nazi-Fascist one was not only a danger for democracies, but a competitive model with the democratic one even within democratic countries.
Putinism has also been an export product for some time and in recent years a strategy of persuasion, conditioning, corruption, enlistment and blackmail towards the heart of the democratic West, which has always seduced and subjugated people and elites, has started from the Kremlin headquarters. more convinced that, as Putin said in his famous interview with the Financial Times in 2019, liberalism is obsolete and has had its day, because millions of people, even in democratic countries, are turning against its most obvious consequences: globalization economic, multiculturalism, immigration.
Nationalism blut und boden (blood and soil), charismatic authoritarianism and ideological totalitarianism as alternatives to the economic uncertainty and political imbalances of democracies in crisis. In this respect, the Hitler and Putinian challenges are truly ominously similar. The difference between one challenge and the other today does not lie in the different criminal caliber of the two characters and in the different projection of their respective hegemonic designs: it lies precisely in the much more ephemeral nature of Russian power and therefore in the much less justifiable nature of ‘appeasement with the Kremlin.
If it can reasonably be assumed that Hitler in 1938 would really have taken a single bite out of the democracies that authorized him to nibble on Czechoslovakia, there is no doubt instead that, in terms of power relations, Putinian Russia would not be able to cope. no confrontation, neither military, nor political, nor economic with the Euro-Atlantic field. Nuclear intimidation and the criminal use of bloodthirsty mercenaries, called upon to remedy the unpreparedness of a reckless and inefficient army, serve to paralyze the European enemy in terror, but by no means demonstrate overwhelming superiority. On the contrary, they demonstrate the desperate and nihilistic nature of the Russian option.
Putinian Russia can become al Qaeda planetary, not a post-Soviet Reich. We continue to discuss the energy embargo by looking at how much it would cost to European states, but it seems paradoxically impossible to acknowledge, with confidence and relief, that by itself perhaps it would be enough to stop the engines of war. Putin cannot even win the war against Ukraine, let alone the war against the West. This is why he seeks a victory at the table of pacifist peace, of peace without justice.
Any strategy aimed at averting the widening of the conflict by sacrificing Ukraine or pieces of Ukraine to Moscow’s claims does not therefore respond to a state of necessity, but to a totally wrong political assessment of what the political price of so-called peace would be, not only for Ukraine, but for Europe. Worried by the continuation of the war, by its economic costs, by the open and bleeding Ukrainian wound in the heart of the continent, too many Italian and European politicians do not seem to fear that Putin will win the war, but on the contrary that he will not be able to win it and can make it chronic and to enlarge in an unconventional form, continuing to threaten European peace and security with its miasmas.
The idea that, after all that has happened, Putin’s Russia can be rehabilitated from the rank of a rogue state to be isolated and overthrown and become a respectable post-war interlocutor again means that too many European democratic leaders have no idea what the dangers to democracy and that Putin still controls too many casemates in the power system of European countries, starting with Italy.
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