Vladimir Putin was who he said he was. Now, the rest of the world has to catch up

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Gary J. Smith is a former career diplomat and Canadian ambassador who served at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow from 1971-74 and at NATO headquarters from 1977-81. He is the author of the forthcoming book Ice War Diplomat: Hockey Meets Cold War Politics at the 1972 Summit Series.

Even beyond the superficial details – including their similar height – there are plenty of comparisons to make between Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Fuehrer Adolf Hitler. Both were viscerally aggrieved about what a previous generation had allowed to happen to their country. Both claimed to want to protect people who speak their country’s language, regardless of where those people may reside. And the world didn’t want to believe what either of them said – either in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, or in Mr. Putin’s speeches mourning the Soviet Empire’s collapse or calling for an ideological and security buffer zone for Russia.

Now, with the launch of Russian military action across a broad front of Ukraine, we face the consequences for our failure of vision.

For Mr. Putin, the populist overthrow of the pro-Russian Ukrainian government in 2014, and the mass revolts in Belarus last year against authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, represented a threat – the further march eastward of democracy, in the form of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. So in December, he demanded an ironclad guarantee that Ukraine would not join NATO, and that its forces would return to where they were stationed in 1997. That would mean removing troops from the 14 Eastern European countries that had joined since then.

Surely, Mr. Putin must have realized all those relatively small countries joined NATO not because they were seeking protection from the United States or Western Europe, but from Russia itself. Who wants to live under authoritarian rule if there is another option? But when his demands were not met, it should not have been a surprise that he would resort to his strong suit: using military force, as he did in Georgia in 2008 and in Crimea and the Donbas region in 2014.

Now, it is clear that Mr. Putin is all-in on his aims to engineer a collapse and replacement of the Ukrainian government and the return of the region to Russian domination and control.

Presumably, given that he does not see Ukraine as an independent country and claims that Ukrainians are Russians’ “brothers,” he will want to avoid inflicting death upon Ukrainian citizens by bombarding the country’s cities. The Russian public, for the same reason, doesn’t want a full-scale war against their fellow Slavs – an act that would create a hatred between the two groups for generations to come. But Russians, like the Soviet and Tzarist publics before them, are unfortunately well-schooled in the authoritarian idea that “silence is survival,” though hundreds of demonstrators have already been arrested across Russia. Mr. Putin has also justified the campaign as an effort at “de-Nazification,” implying the potential for even more draconian measures to come.

The invasion has sparked new strategic developments for the region that Canada and our NATO allies now have to consider. Russian troops are now lodged in Belarus, and they represent chess pieces for Russia to provoke a NATO withdrawal of forces from Eastern Europe. Estonia and Latvia also have to be concerned about the presence of large numbers of Russian speakers in their country, while Lithuania and Poland must be worried that Moscow will demand a corridor to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea. The former Soviet republic of Moldova, meanwhile, sits just southwest of Ukraine, and Russian forces are already stationed there, in the unrecognized breakaway state of Transnistria.

Canada must also make preparations for the coming outflow of refugees from Ukraine, many of whom might head to Canada, which is home to the world’s second-largest Ukrainian diaspora. Russian cyber-attacks should also be expected in response to international sanctions.

We are now in a dangerous period of brinkmanship. NATO and the West need to show military resolve and unity to blunt Mr. Putin’s far-reaching ambitions, but they must also be careful: No one, including Mr. Putin, knows where a major ground war will end, and given that Russia has a nuclear arsenal, his warnings of an “immediate response with consequences never seen in history” against any countries that intervene are concerning.

It is sadly ironic that in the 1960s and 1970s, the goal of the Soviet Union was to solidify postwar borders and prevent German “revanchism”– a belief that Germany would try to take back lands that had been held by German speakers in East Prussia and elsewhere for centuries. Now it is a Russian leader who is revanchist, wanting to roll back modern history. We should have seen it coming.

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