As Putin’s regime invades Ukraine, it is worth remembering two things:
The Russian people do not support the Putin regime
There’s a big and meaningful difference between the Russian Government and the Russian people. The evils of the Putin regime are not the fault of the Russian people (neither here in the West, or those in Russia). The Russian people were the first victims of their Government which keeps the Russian people in a state of poverty, peasantry and desperation.
If Putin was genuinely popular, and was genuinely supported by the Russian people, he would allow free, fair and open elections. Of course, he does not allow free, fair or open elections because Putin knows that the Russian people do not support him. This powerful and logical point was made very persuasively by Natan Sharansky’s wonderful book, The Case for Democracy. Sharansky himself was imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag system, and lived to tell the tale.
Russian regimes have experience in harming the people of Ukraine
Putin’s evil predecessor regime, the Communist Soviet regime previously imposed a horrific genocide on the Ukrainian people in the form of the Holodomor. We are approaching its 100th anniversary, and if you don’t know the history, here’s my movie review of an excellent movie of the barbarian evils of Russian Communism.