Putin has created his own worst nightmare. And ours.

On February 24th, Putin and his “Greater Russia” nationalists have made their own worst nightmares come true, destroyed any hope for Russia’s near future, and put every Russian in the world in danger.

First things first: if you want to help, please donate to one of the charities operating in Ukraine, for example the Ukrainian Red Cross. And now to the article.

I come from a country that does not exist. My mother left what was the smoldering remains of the Soviet Union when I was a kid. It happened soon after tanks rolled into Moscow, through groups of people and burned-out trolleybuses, in the coup against Gorbachev organized in large parts by the KGB. My mother decided to follow her new soon-to-be husband to Germany, when it became clear to her that the Soviet Union is descending into chaos, and any attempt to patriotically “hold the line” would probably, due to the peculiarities of her job, end up with us starving, and with her child having no future. Now, thirty years later, millions of mothers are fleeing Ukraine under much worse circumstances, driven out by the same thugs that have been responsible for the original coup against Gorbachev that had given us the final push to move.

Their goals, now as before, can be summarized as “Russia above all else”: a great union with Russia at its head, with Russian as its state language. Back…