An Invasion 30 Years in the Making | Guerrilla War in Ukraine | Is This Putin’s “Suez Moment”?

Neo-Nazis Are Exploiting Russia’s War in Ukraine for Their Own Purposes  (Rita Katz, Washington Post)
“Hi can you please forward a message since two of us are trying to get a carshare from germany to ukraine going,” reads a Feb. 26 message forwarded to a popular neo-Nazi Web channel. “We are 3 french, leaving Strasbourg tomorrow morning with our car,” another message answered. “There is place for 2 german fighters.” These are the types of conversations that have flooded Western neo-Nazi and white-nationalist venues online every day since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine: users organizing carpools, plotting how to cross the Poland-Ukraine border to join the fight against Russia. Their goal is not to defend Ukraine as we know it — a multiethnic, democratically minded society led by a Jewish president. Some neo-Nazis simply see this new war as a place to act out their violent fantasies. For others, though, the force pulling them toward the conflict is a shared vision for an ultranationalist ethno-state. They see Ukraine as a golden opportunity to pursue this goal and turn it into a model to export across the world. The would-be militants have been recruited by groups like the Azov Battalion, a far-right nationalist Ukrainian paramilitary and political movement. Azov was absorbed into the Ukrainian national guard in 2014 and has been a basis for Putin’s false claim that Ukraine’s government is run by neo-Nazis.

Facebook Owner Defends Policy on Calls for violence That Angered Russia  (Mark Trevelyan, Reuters)
Facebook owner Meta Platforms (FB.O) said Friday that a temporary change in its content policy, only for Ukraine, was needed to let users voice opposition to Russia’s attack, as Russia opened a criminal case after the company said it would allow posts such as “death to the Russian invaders.” Russian prosecutors asked a court to designate the U.S. tech giant as an “extremist organization,” and the communications regulator said it would restrict access to Meta’s Instagram starting March 14. The company said the decision would affect 80 million users in Russia. “A criminal case has been initiated … in connection with illegal calls for murder and violence against citizens of the Russian Federation by employees of the American company Meta, which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram,” Russia’s Investigative Committee said. The committee reports directly to President Vladimir Putin. It was not immediately clear what the consequences of the criminal case might be.

Is This Putin’s “Suez Moment”?  (Harold James, The Spectator)
Suez is long remembered as a critical moment in Britain’s imperial decline. Might future historians say something similar about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? There are a number of striking parallels between Britain’s relationship with the United States in the 1950s and Russia’s ties with China today.

Russia-Ukraine War: An Invasion 30 Years in the Making  (Alix Kroeger and Phil Clarke Hill, New Statesman)
For Vladimir Putin, the fall of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.