There is nothing novel about the current Russian drive to annex Ukraine. They have been doing this sort of thing for centuries. The several Russian Empires came to include virtually all the one-time nations on its borders. These seizures were most extensive and intense in the later 19th-early 20th centuries under the First Russian Empire of the Tsars: Siberia, Caucasus, Central Asia, etc., etc. The Bolsheviks of the Second Russian Empire continued grabbing up neighbors property, particularly through the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Nazis that gave them half of Poland and the Balkan countries and then through the creation of the Iron Curtain that as good as absorbed all neighbors into the Russian Empire. Russian rapacity seemed to have eased up with the fall of the Second Empire, but that was only an interlude while the Third Empire under Putin I was tooling up. Putin I has now resumed traditional Russian foreign policy: Conquer and annex, conquer and subjugate, conquer and control completely. 

This is bad enough. But what if we describe Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in less refined terms. Again, Asia is belching a host of barbarians against the West. Putin’s army is following in the footsteps of the Huns, the Mongols, the Cossacks, the Red Army. “But surely, Russia is too civilized, too sophisticated to sponsor an army of barbarians.” Well, we must recall accounts of Russian atrocities in countries it annexed, e.g., the Katyn Massacre in Poland, and the atrocities of the Red Army raping and butchering its way through civilian populations whom it was “liberating” at the end of WWII. We must realize that Molotov’s criticism of the West for being too sentimental about the loss of human life is not only a Bolshevik criticism, but a Russian criticism as well.