Modern Minister of Foreign Affairs in Canada is a grand-daughter of a guy who served in a prisoner camp and killed many Jews... just some terrible facts...
Let me give you some facts.
Putin was a Colonel in the KGB and the head of the KGB in East Germany.
The KGB, Tscheka, FSB... whatever it was called in its various forms was the worst criminal organization in the history of mankind.
Nobody will ever know how many people they killed, some estimates are close to 100 million.
"one death is a tragedy, 10,000 is a statistic"
Katyn, the holodomor, the gulag, that's the legacy of these people.
When the western allies liberated Germany at the end of WWII they liberated concentration camps.
There is a concentration camp outside Berlin called Sachsenhausen; when the communists took over the eastern part of Germany they just repurposed it and imprisoned "nazis"; except that nazis included anybody who owned land or property in eastern Germany or opposed totalitarian regimes.
AT the beginning of WWII the Germans invaded Poland only after Molotov and Ribbentrop had signed the secret pact dividing Poland.
Ribbentrop was hanged after the Nuremberg Trials and rightfully though, Molotov unfortunately was not.
Then Stalin and his scum invaded the eastern part of Poland, the baltic, Finland.
Ask the people in Eastern Europe, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland... how they feel about the Russians.
I'm sure those Polish officers massacred by the KGB at Katyn would have been treated better by the Nazis.
How about the Forest Brothers in the baltic who fought the stalinists into the sixties?
And don't get personal with me. Growing up I had family and friends who had survived East German prisons, labour camps and the Gulag.
I was a soldier in the Cold War, when we (Nato, including Canadians in Lahr in the Black Forest) were facing them across the Czech border to preserve the freedom of at least the Western Part of Europe.
That is the tradition were Putin and his criminal scum come from.
Shooting down a Malayan Airliner (and lying about it), poisoning exil Russians with Polonium. They are the same criminal scum they always were.
The west should cripple their economy and financial system with the most severe sanctions we could conceive and give us much support as possible to the Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic States.