US House Speaker; Nancy Pelosi has condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, calling his invasion of Ukraine “a very evil move” before implicitly comparing him to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. She compared Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to what Hitler did in Czechoslovakia before World War II.
“Many of us have visited Ukraine and have seen that they love democracy,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press conference following her return from several countries overseas, including the United Kingdom and Germany.
“They do not want to live under Vladimir Putin. He does not want the Russian people to see what democracy looks like. And therefore he wants to bring them under his domain.”
Pelosi also made the case that Putin, by his background as a Russian intelligence officer, is particularly skilled at deceiving his citizens.
“Putin is a master of KGB, KGB, KGB, KGB,” Pelosi said, pounding the podium. “His orientation is a misrepresentation, and he’s effective at that unless we inoculate against it unless we make a case against it so that the Russian people know the truth.”
She then went on to compare Putin’s recognition of the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine — two-thirds of which are still controlled by Ukraine — to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 and invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939.
“This is a very evil move on the part of Vladimir Putin,” she declared. “He’s a KGB guy who happens to be probably the richest man in the world because he exploited his own people that he doesn’t want them to know about.”
“This, my friends, is our moment,” she added. “This is the Sudetenland, that’s what people were saying there. You cannot ignore what Putin is doing.”
She added that Putin’s invasion is a “total assault on democracy.”