Putin’s taste for terror is nothing new

There is tragically nothing new about the scenes of indiscriminate terror unfolding in Ukraine: bombing and shelling unleashed by Putin’s forces in the streets of Kharkiv and Mariupol against civilians today is a familiar tale – almost a reflex action – of what Russia does whenever it is faced with opposition or the defiance of a smaller nation. We have been here before. In fact anyone born in 1952, the year of Vladimir Putin’s birth, has been here many times: East Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, Kabul in 1979, Grozny in 1999 and Aleppo in 2016. 

Lashing out in insensate rage and violence and sending in the tanks is not only Moscow’s default position against external enemies, however: systematic state terror is built into the very foundations of Putin’s regime, and used just as ruthlessly against those he perceives as his internal foes. Russia’s dictator inherited his taste for terror from the cradle.