Russia treacherously attacked our state in the morning, as Nazi Germany did in #2WW years. As of today, our countries are on different sides of world history. 🇷🇺 has embarked on a path of evil, but 🇺🇦 is defending itself & won’t give up its freedom no matter what Moscow thinks. A Tweet by Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUaПрезидент України Ukraine president.gov.ua

when you read about Ukraine in the news now, you might think of it as a strange place. War, tanks, dead etc. But Ukraine is a normal country with people willing a normal life. To be happy, enjoy life, raise kids. Not to attack anybody. Normality is an important word here A Tweet by Volodymyr Yermolenko @yermolenko_vUkrainian philosopher, analyst & journalist, chief editor at @ukraine_world – explaining Ukrainian politics & society in English.

Driving on the road towards Kyiv and the radio announcer is giving out instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails. A Tweet by Shaun Walker @shaunwalker7 Covering central/eastern Europe for The Guardian. Author of The Long Hangover: Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past.

More TV, more articles to come, but I’m sad and angry. Ukraine is suffering another long night alone. The sanctions so far are weak, ignoring Putin’s worst oligarchs. They would have been fine in 2008, or even 6 months ago. Now, with Kyiv under siege? Too little, too late. A Tweet by Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63 Join RDI! @Renew_Democracy. Chairman of the Human Rights Foundation. Author, speaker, 13th World Chess Champion.

I’m always surprised when I see pictures of people from Ukraine. I always expect them to be more exotic, more like people from further east on the Silk Road, more like people from Kazakhstan, not like blond Europeans. I shouldn’t be though. They are European even if they write their language in Cyrillic and they are even what we would call a first-world country – if that is still OK to use as an identifier – in that they have subways and traffic jams. But it is important ti know that they are not first-world in that their main exports are seed oil, corn, and wheat and they are big importers of coal briquettes and used clothing. The country has a population of over 44,000,000 souls, most of whom want to be more European and less Russian and the capitol, Kyiv, is the seventh-largest city in Europe with a population of almost 3,000,000, bigger than Chicago, Rome, or Paris, so Putin may end up like the dog that caught the bus. Imagining tanks rolling into one of those cities gave me the chills.

I’m reading a book on Hitler and it may be coloring my thinking but, it seems to me that Putin is a typical autocrat in that he will keep trying to enlarge his empire until he is stopped. He attacked Georgia during the Bush Administration calling it a peace-keeping special operation. Then he took the Crimea and an enclave in eastern Ukraine during the Obama Administration and now he is going after the rest of Ukraine. If he takes Ukraine, there is no reason to think he will stop trying to rebuild the USSR by bluff, threat, and, if necessary, tanks. If Putin takes Ukraine, the next target would probably be Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, who are members of NATO, which would mean a major war for sure. The whole thing is frightening.