Seriously. When I hear things like, “Oh, Putin’s gone crazy! He’s killing people now!” — as if this is some new development — I just sit there, gobsmacked. Like, hello? Where have you been for the past hundred years? Or even the past ten? This isn’t some sudden twist in the plot. This is the plot.

Putin didn’t wake up one morning in 2022 and decide to become the villain. He’s not a loose cannon who just started misfiring. And he certainly didn’t just start suddenly killing people a few days ago!!! He’s a calculated continuation of a system that has always used violence, lies, and brute force to suppress, subjugate, and erase entire peoples. Russia has been doing this — invading, massacring, erasing, exploiting — for more than a century.

Let’s just lay this out plain and simple:

Russia has invaded over 30 countries in the past 150 years.

From the Tsars to Stalin to Putin, the methods have barely changed: invade, terrorise, install puppet regimes, wipe out opposition, and crush any identity that doesn’t serve the empire. Millions have died. Entire nations have lost generations. And for what? For power. For oil. For ideology. For the false glory of empire.

And before someone jumps in with the old, “But other empires did the same thing…”, yes — empires have existed throughout history. The British, French, Germans, Ottomans, Mongols — all guilty. But here’s the difference: most of them that survived, have, at the very least, acknowledged the atrocities. They’ve apologised. They’ve tried, however imperfectly, to reckon with their past. Russia? Not once. Not a single meaningful apology. Not a single real reckoning. Instead, they double down — glorifying Stalin, whitewashing Soviet crimes, and justifying new invasions as “liberation.”