Can the world afford to ignore history anymore?

The lessons learnt during time of war or pestilence are so very quickly forgotten, and then we repeat the failures that led to them. This is being done now by Putin in Ukraine, calling them 'Nazis' after the large group of Ukrainians who became partisans in 1943, and opposed both the Nazi occupiers, and also the Bolshevik oppressors. But Putin should remember the larger number of partisans were in Belarus, his primary ally, so his hoped for historical precedence is flawed. The Soviet army in 1943 sought to extinguish this partisanism in both places.

Putin is forgetting that the fruit of hard-line policy is likely to be oppositions rising in places he didn't expect. Indeed, out in the east, in Siberia, the large wealth-producing area held by the Russians, there is an opposition growing loud against the Russian 'overlord', and the call for self-determination. Putin, if he survives the illegal war with Ukraine, will next be fighting wars in the east, in Siberia, and most likely against the soldiers he has forced to fight in Ukraine. The lessons of the war, a war of oppression, are coming round to bite!