Almost as soon as Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine, political pundits began comparing him to Hitler. Both men had 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 Hitler and Putin invaded a series of neighbouring countries, both used lies and disinformation to justify their actions, both used a symbol – in Putin’s case “Z”, 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 ends.
Jonathan Katz, the Washington-based director of the Democracy Initiatives network, has described Putin as “this century’s equivalent to Hitler”. Putin’s character, he says, “disturbingly mirrors traits of Hitler”. The former director of US national intelligence James Clapper has told CNN that Putin is “a 21st-century Hitler”, a phrase used by a variety of commentators ranging from the former Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to the Ukrainian minister of defence. The British Liberal Democrat politician Norman Baker has claimed in the Daily Mail that “everything Vladimir Putin does echoes Adolf Hitler”. Even the Prince of Wales, speaking to a Jewish Holocaust survivor in Canada in 2014 after the Russian invasion of Crimea, said that “Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler.” Critics of the West’s cautious approach to Putin’s territorial aggrandisements routinely draw parallels with the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Britain and France sought to appease Hitler and avert a general war by forcing Czechoslovakia to give in to the Nazi dictator’s demands for a large chunk of its territory.
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