With Russia launching a full-scale attack on Ukraine, Dr Lee Duffield analyses events leading up to the invasion.
THERE WAS A SPURIOUS RELIEF in the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February: no more need for pretending, or false diplomacy, even no need for talk about rights and wrongs.
It is back to the raw power days, Russian tanks in Budapest in 1956, then again in Prague in 1968. Attempts at political reform and opening to the West came to that.
It was not the same with the "people's revolutions" of Eastern Europe in 1989, when the Soviet Union was in no position to use the tanks; and that looks to have become the number one irritant to the man at the centre of the violence now, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin.
He has reminisced about his shock in 1989 as a Soviet KGB officer posted to Leipzig in East Germany, the scene of the biggest protests. Our paths may have crossed in the street. Working there as a correspondent, it was a struggle to believe what you saw and to report it - as it would have been for security agent Putin. To him, democracy must have looked like an ugly waste of cherished Soviet values.
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