Putin’s “Living Space” In Ukraine

Ein Lebensraum für Comrade Putin

This Ukrainian wheat filed would the perfect spot for no one, thinks Putin Photo by Matthew Smith on Unsplash

The war in the Ukraine appears preposterous. But I must return to the encounter with history to finally figure it out. Putin is like Hitler. He is slaughtering everything in the “Donbas”, the region where the war has been raging since 2014. Now there is almost nothing left, it finally dawned on me what he wants: some living space.

That is hardly as gentle as it sounds. The original idea comes from the Germans who bombed the heck out of the Soviets in middle Europe in 1941, violating the peace treaty they set in 1939 with the Soviets. What happened then is like what happened now, but in reverse. Hitler decided he could live next to the Bolsheviks and decided to invade Russia with the excuse of “de-Bolshevizing” Europe. The Bolsheviks were branded as Jews. In effect, Putin just claimed the reverse: he started a war after some relative peace with the claim on “de-nazifying” Ukraine.

The purpose of Hitler’s offensive was to be defensive, like Putin. To purge an ideology from a part of Europe that wasn’t posing any immediate threat. It was a good excuse though as the ideology itself was dangerous. The “real” reason, or at least one of the reasons, was to create “Ein Lebensraum,” a literal ‘living space.” This would be better translated as a buffer zone, a no man’s land where everything is bomb to the ground.