As the historian and journalist Anne Applebaum observed, the answer depended on which country you asked. Western policy makers interpreted the war through the prism of the past. But they saw different parallels. The United States and the United Kingdom compared Russia’s Ukraine invasion to Nazi Germany’s dismembering of Poland in 1939. Putin was Hitler, Kyiv was Warsaw, and February 24, 2022, matched September 1, 1939—the date that marked the outbreak of the Second World War. Poland itself shared this analogy.
