Russia is a terrorist state. I am Czech. I am European. And I will always remember: 1939. Stalin's Soviet Union strikes a deal with Hitler's Germany. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is not merely a non-aggression treaty, but an agreement to divide Eastern Europe. Germany invades Poland on September 1. The Soviets join the invasion on September 17. Together, the two powers carve up Poland. 1940. The Soviet Union occupies Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania by military force and subsequently annexes them. Three independent nations disappear from the map of Europe for decades. 1940. The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, systematically murder approximately 22,000 Polish officers, police officers, and members of the intelligentsia. The Katyn massacre becomes a symbol of state-organized mass murder. Moscow denies responsibility for decades. 1945–1989. The Soviet Union brings much of Central and Eastern Europe under its control. It installs and maintains puppet regimes, crushes political opposition, orchestrates show trials, executions, imprisonment, and deportations. Millions of people in the Soviet Union itself pass through the Gulag system, which had existed long before World War II. 1956. Hungarians attempt to break free from Soviet domination. Moscow responds with tanks. The uprising is brutally crushed, thousands are killed, and hundreds of thousands flee the country. 1968. The Soviet Union leads a military invasion of Czechoslovakia. An attempt to reform socialism and build a freer society ends beneath the tracks of Soviet tanks. What follows is political repression, purges, emigration, and another 21 years of Soviet occupation troops stationed in the country. 2014. Russia militarily occupies and illegally annexes Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. At the same time, it fuels and supports an armed conflict in the Donbas. Russia's war against Ukraine did not begin in 2022. It began eight years earlier. 2022. Russia launches a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It destroys cities, attacks civilian infrastructure, and kills civilians. Bucha, Mariupol, mass graves, torture, and the forced deportation of Ukrainian children. Another chapter in a history in which Moscow treats the independence of neighboring nations as something it has the right to decide. Regimes change. Ideologies change. Flags and rhetoric change. What does not change is the belief that Russia has the right to determine the fate of its neighbors. And whenever one of those neighbors chooses its own path, Moscow stands ready to remind it, through military force, of its own idea of freedom. (📷 Soviet tanks in Prague's Wenceslas Square, beneath the statue of St. Wenceslas, the patron saint of the Czech lands. August 1968.) #russiaisaterroriststate