Is Putin’s war more like the WWI or WWII?

Beware the “lessons of history” as drawn by charlatans, ignoramuses or tyrants, for they will be daft, wrong and possibly disastrous. The self-serving amateur historiography of Russian President Vladimir Putin is an example.
Last year, he invented a narrative “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” which was subsequently revealed as one of the hallucinations that made him attack Ukraine. The other day, he was at it again, comparing himself to Peter the Great, and hinting that “it seems it has fallen to us, too, to reclaim and strengthen.” That implied he might like to wage war against Sweden (as Peter did in the 18th century) and seize lands that are now part of Estonia, a member of Nato.
Oh dear. If Putin’s overall legacy will be nothing like Peter’s — the Tsar, like Putin, was brutal and imperialistic, but also known for opening Russia toward the West and progress. Yet Putin is a dictator in possession of the launch codes for the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons, so his ravings are terrifying.
That said, the inevitability that some people will draw inane conclusions from history shouldn’t prevent the rest of us from trying to be more sophisticated about it. As the Maori of New Zealand say, we walk backwards into the future with our eyes fixed on the past. We need history to make sense of the world; we need yesterday to understand today.
The trick is to be eclectic, precise and subtle. Nobody today is exactly like Hannibal, Boudica, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Catherine the Great or any other historical figure. But specific aspects of people and events in the past do echo down the ages. We just have to be clear about what those are in each context. In groping for analogies to Putin’s war against Ukraine, there are lots of possibilities. I’ve compared the scenarios to the outcomes of the Korean War and the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland; others have looked to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 and beyond.
For most people, however, the most evocative comparisons are to the First and Second World War — not least, because of fears that Putin may yet escalate and hurl us into a Third one. But those two previous conflagrations were completely different, and offer diverging lessons.
Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and other Eastern Europeans tend to view Russia’s war of aggression as comparable to Nazi Germany’s assaults on Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1938-39. Polish President Andrzeij Duda, for example, has explicitly compared Putin to Adolf Hitler.
By contrast, German and French intellectuals and politicians prefer analogies to World War I. In part, that’s because of a German taboo against comparing anything to Hitler (a sort of reverse Godwin’s Law), since that would seem to cast doubt on the historical singularity of the Fuehrer’s crimes, above all the Holocaust.
By citing World War I, these observers are also signaling concern that the West, like Europe in 1914, could accidentally stumble into a bigger disaster. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has invoked “The Sleepwalkers” by Christopher Clark. That book describes in minute detail how Europe’s statesmen (they were all men), in responding to the assassination by a Bosnian Serb of an Austro-Hungarian prince in a Balkan backwater, slid into a continental fratricide because they didn’t comprehend the automatic escalation spirals they had built into their alliance systems and mobilisation schedules. With such precedents in mind, leaders will tend to view Ukraine’s Donbas as akin to Bosnia Herzegovina in 1914 — a land where the West has interests, but also a liminal place that could be a potential trap, luring Nato countries into a shooting war against Russia, with unknowable consequences.

—Bloomberg