Lucas: Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine akin to Nazi siege of …

The elderly Ukrainian woman on the park bench bemoaning the criminal death and destruction around her could have been Vladimir Putins mother in Leningrad.

That was when the Nazis in World War II surrounded, bombarded and strangled Leningrad, the way the Russians are doing today to Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities.

By the time the Nazi siege ended, some 800,000 innocent men, women and children had been killed by Hitlers bombs or died from starvation and disease. Leningrad was rubble.

One of the dead was Viktor Putin, Vladimir Putins 2-year-old brother, whom he never met. (Vladimir Putin was born in 1952.)

Putins mother, Maria Ivanova Putin, who nearly died of starvation, had taken the boy to a childrens shelter for safety. Putins father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, was in a military hospital recovering from wounds suffered fighting the Nazis.

Viktor contracted diphtheria at the shelter and died in his mothers arms, like so many other Leningrad children.

To this day, Putin does not know where his brother is buried. Hitlers criminality made mass graves common in Leningrad, just as Putin is doing in Ukraine.

Nobody knows what Maria Ivanova Putin did or said upon Viktors death, or what the other mothers said about Hitler, the man who caused the deaths of so many of their children in Leningrad and elsewhere.

But you can imagine that it was like, what that grandmotherly looking woman crying on the park bench said to CNN as she viewed the dead bodies of innocent women and children killed by Putins bombs in Sloviansk in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

She said to reporter Clarissa Ward, Why cant they stop this one idiot? If they send me, I will shoot him.

What people said about Hitler back then is what they are saying about Putin today. Putin has become Hitler. He is doing to Ukraine killing innocent women and children what the Nazis did to the Russians in Leningrad.

No one shot Hitler. But the Allies the Americans, British, Russians and French did stop him. With the war lost, Hitler shot himself on April 30, 1945.

No one will shoot Putin. But with help from NATO and the western democracies, Ukraine will stop him, if the Russian people do not rise up and stop him first.

Or he could end up hanging upside down from a lamppost in Milan after being riddled by bullets, like fellow World War II dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy.

Like Hitler and Mussolini, Putin has bitten off more than he can chew. Dictators do not last long once they begin to lose, and Putin is losing.

While Putin has no memory of World War II, he has nothing but praise for the hardships and perseverance of the Russian people who suffered greatly at the hands of the Nazis.

Ironically, he could have been talking about the heroic stand of the Ukrainian people fighting against him today.

In a prescient, haunting passage in an article by Putin commemorating the 75th anniversary of World War II that ran in the June 2020 edition of the National Interest, Putin sounds like something Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will one day say.

Putin wrote that people his age need to get their children and grandchildren to understand the torment and hardship their ancestors had to endure.

They need to understand how their ancestors managed to persevere and win. Where did their sheer unbending willpower that amazed and fascinated the whole world come from?

Sure, they were defending their home, their children, loved ones and families. However, what they shared was the love of their homeland, their motherland.

That deep-seated, intimate feeling is fully reflected in the very essence of our nation and became one of the decisive factors in its heroic, sacrificial fight against the Nazis.

Substitute Russians for Nazis and Zelenskyy could give that speech to the Ukrainian people. Maybe he will.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

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Lucas: Putin's atrocities in Ukraine akin to Nazi siege of ...