Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has not only violated borders — it has resurrected the most brutal practices of total war from the mid-20th century, proving that evil has merely changed its flags.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has revived the brutal “total war” strategies of World War II – massive city bombardment, harsh occupation rule, enforced camps, and genocide. Cities are shelled to break morale, puppet regimes are installed with terror, and civilians are filtered or expelled based on nationality.
Western leaders are warning that conceding to these tactics now risks repeating the mistakes of 1938. As Ukraine’s president Zelensky warned before the war, “when a bomb crater appears in the school yard, children have a question: has the world forgotten its mistakes of the XX century?” The lesson of Munich is clear: delay in confronting aggression only raises the cost later.
Russia has waged a campaign of strategic bombing on Ukraine’s cities that echoes WWII air raids. Modern missiles and drones have rained explosives on residential areas and infrastructure, cutting power, water, and heating. This deliberately targets civilians and vital services – condemned as “acts of pure terror” by the EU Commission.
The pattern mirrors Hitler’s bombing of London and other cities during the 1940s. In both eras the aggressors sought to break enemy morale through indiscriminate bombardment, but the bombed populations kept resisting. Today’s strikes on Ukrainian cities – from Kharkiv to Mariupol – follow this same script of terror bombing, with Ukraine’s defenders standing on the ground and the Ukrainians sheltering in subways much as Londoners hid underground in 1940.
Moreover, in territories occupied by Russia, the invaders have imposed harsh occupational regimes, torturing or threatening civilians and officials. The Russians installed puppet authorities in every city and village, using intimidation or picking local turncoats, while anyone who refused was swiftly removed or worse. This façade of elected rule is described as a “paper-thin veneer” behind which coercion and terror actually reign.
Russian forces have set up a network of filtration camps in occupied Ukraine that function like WWII-era internment camps. In this system, civilians fleeing combat zones are stopped at checkpoints, forced into camps or makeshift centers, and subjected to interrogation and detention.
Witnesses describe detainees locked in tent camps and basements, tortured for having Ukrainian passports or family in the army, even threatened with execution over extortion schemes. Many who “fail” the filter (due to perceived pro-Ukrainian views or “incorrect” answers) simply vanish into prison cells or tortured.
These camps have historical precedents. Late in WWII, Stalin ordered returning Soviet POWs and deportees screened in filtration camps to catch “traitors” – an atrocity that tortured tens of thousands and led many to execution or Gulag. Post-Soviet Russia even resurrected this in the Chechen Wars (1990s), where suspected fighters were interned and tortured, leading to mass disappearances.
In short, Russia is reviving the filtration-camp model of Stalinist purges and Nazi-style internment under a new name. As Yakubova notes, the goal is the ontological destruction of Ukrainian identity: if the Nazis destroyed people on racial grounds, the contemporary Kremlin regime does so on the basis of national self-consciousness.
Yet the most disturbing recurrence is not the actions of the aggressor (tragically predictable for an empire), but the reaction of the democratic world. Western behavior before the full-scale invasion and in its first months strikingly resembles the diplomatic paralysis of 1938–1939. A clear parallel can also be drawn between today’s policy of “de-escalation” and the 1938 Munich Agreement.
Then, Chamberlain and Daladier handed Hitler the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, hoping to bring peace. In 2014, the world effectively swallowed the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donbas, attempting to help Putin “save face.” As 80 years ago, trying to placate an aggressor through concessions only fuels his appetite. The dictators perceive concessions as weakness. In the West there is a sharp debate over whether concessions invite further aggression. Ukraine’s leaders insist, as Zelensky put it, that appeasement only emboldens dictators: “…Appeasement. Result?…the annexation of Crimea and aggression against my state”.
Today, fear of escalation by a nuclear state is paralyzing resolve just as fear of the Luftwaffe once paralyzed Paris. Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha told EU counterparts that “any peace plan [is] not doable if it is based on appeasement of the aggressor”. Polish foreign minister Sikorski similarly cautioned that “the lesson of Munich” shows “the cost of countering a despot will only grow the longer democracies wait”.
In the end, we are dealing with the “shadow” of the Second World War that never fully disappeared. The Nuremberg Trials condemned Nazism, but communism (and later its successor – Russia’s state ideology) escaped the courtroom. This impunity bred revanchism.
Today, Ukraine plays the role that Poland or Finland could not fully play in 1939 – it has become the dam holding back the flood of totalitarianism
. And the world’s main conclusion should be simple: appeasement does not work. “Never again” will become real only when the aggressor suffers a crushing military defeat, as Germany did in 1945.
