Russia invades Ukraine: world hasn't learned

Not a happy day on Planet Earth today, as Russia invaded Ukraine in what is likely the most geopolitically dangerous unilateral action since the Second World War.

I wasn't around in the 1930s, but I suspect this is what it felt like to watch tyranny unleash itself on countries and people whose only sin was being in the wrong place on the planet. Or being the wrong, you know, religion or culture.

I similarly suspect today, the day that Russian dictator (please, let's not mince words) Vladimir Putin, ordered his troops to invade Ukraine, will be remembered in history as yet another turning point where the world crossed the line from blissful ignorance to cruel realization of an inhuman reality.

I remember the former Soviet Union collapsing under its own weight in 1989. I watched the incredible scenes of the Berlin Wall being torn down, and I wondered if once-Soviets-now-Russians could really change their stripes overnight.

Hatreds going back hundreds of years don't simply vanish in a blink, and to assume that those who ran the machinery of a limitlessly oppressive, paranoid, and corrupt USSR would suddenly see the democratic light and join the rest of the world in a sort-of-post-Cold-War rendition of Kumbaya struck me as more than a little idealistic.

Just over 32 years since the fateful fall of the Iron Curtain, it's now clear that little has changed. Putin was simply biding his time.

The world now faces a stark choice: allow it to happen, and thus virtually guarantee Putin and his sycophants a license to continue their campaign of European expansion, or draw a line in the sand and reinforce the fact that the world of 2022 is very different than the world of the 1930s.

Today, I'm not convinced it is. And that should frighten us all, wherever we live, to our very core.