The threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine needs to be seen in the historical perspective

The history books of Russia that Vladimir Putin read when he was growing up in the 60s did not admit to the fact that following the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, Josef Stalin ordered the massacre of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia in the Katyn Forest. Some Russian historians believe Stalin ordered the mass murder as an act of revenge for the defeat of the Soviets during the Polish-Soviet War when they attempted to annex newly re-created Poland between 1918 and 1921. It would not be until fifty years after the 1940 massacre that Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the NKVD, the Soviet Secret police, had executed the Poles.