World War Three?

If World War III does happen, it won't start in the Middle East but, as always, in Europe.

Civil war has persisted in Ukraine since April over the fate of the country's eastern regions, with the new Ukrainian government in Kiev fighting the pro-Russian rebels who want to separate from Ukraine and possibly join Russia, or at least become a Russian puppet state.  Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly been sending troops to help the rebels, effectively invading Ukrainian territory.

Putin speaks of Ukraine as part of "Novorossiya," or "New Russia," a swath of territory conquered by the Romanovs in the eighteenth century and established as part of Ukraine when it became one of the first republics of the Soviet Union.  Much of the area, which comprises southern Ukraine, is still heavily populated by ethnic Russians - who account for 21 percent of Ukraine's entire population - and is referred to by Putin as historically being an extension of Russia.

This is similar to the language Adolf Hitler used to justify the 1938 German annexation of the Sudetenland, the ethnic-German region of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), as well as, ironically, the German invasion of Ukraine in 1941 (because the east Goths, an ancestral tribe of the modern Germanic people, settled there).  Hitler - who, like Putin, became the leader of his country because his party got the most votes in an election - also used historical claims to land and the Free City of Danzig (a German-speaking city-state that was sort of like today's Singapore - Danzig is now the Polish city of Gdańsk) as an excuse for the invasion of  Poland . . . which took place 75 years ago today.

Just pointing something out . . .