Free Republic

No country is as much a prisoner of its past as Russia. And no leader has become as much a victim of his own obsessive lies as Vladimir Putin. But where did this tragedy for the Russian people as well as Ukraine begin? And why did we not see this coming after the unspeakable brutality of Putin's conduct of war in Chechnya and Syria, deliberately using barrel bombs and nerve gas against civilian populations? I certainly cannot claim to be one of the very few who had foreseen Putin's reckless gamble of invading Ukraine. I also underestimated the lingering resentment...

Russian officials have ordered to inspect and remove books by well-known British historians John Keegan and Antony Beevor from libraries, saying they promote Nazi-era stereotypes. The move is among a raft of measures to streamline historical narrative by limiting alternative viewpoints, as well as ending the perceived foreign influence from fields such as education. The regional education ministry in Sverdlovsk, near the Ural Mountains, issued a decree telling school and university libraries to 'check the availability of books' by the historians and 'take measures to remove them from access by students and teaching staff'.