Timothy Snider: If Russia swallows Ukraine, the European system is finished

By CNN.

Published March 6, 2014 at 12:23 pm

Ukraine today, like Austria in the 1930s, is a creation of a dramatic change in the world order.

Photo by Anastasia Vlasova

As Russia continues its military occupation of the Crimean district of Ukraine, as Putin enunciates a doctrine of military intervention in support of ethnic brethren, and the West ponders what might be done, Europeans begin to think again about the 1930s and the origins of World War II.

The Russian historian Andrei Zubov, for example, has published a sophisticated comparison between Putin’s seizure of Crimea and Adolf Hitler’s annexation of
Austria, seeing both as the beginning of a chain of events with fatal
consequences not just for the subjects of the aggression but for the
aggressors themselves.