It is true that Putin is not Hitler; only Hitler is Hitler. However, we can still compare the two men profitably. There are ominous parallels despite the stark differences. Of course, some people will be naturally reluctant to contrast the two men: After all, Hitler is the personification of evil and Putin, well, is just a run of the mill ex-KGB murderer in their minds. However, given that we are all interested in averting a world war, it only makes sense to see if Putin’s actions resemble those that started the last one. It is only by daring to look at these two men side by side that we can properly assess the likelihood of Ukrainian conflict escalating into a world war. (In principle, an analysis comparing Putin to the major leaders who started WWI might be necessary as well, I admit.) If the current geopolitical situation resembles the one leading up to WWII, we would be negligent not to recognize that fact because of the taboo against invoking Hitler. This taboo only exists because most of those invocations were emotive nonsense, not serious attempts at historiography. We are not evoking Hitler for theatrical reasons but in a sober attempt to learn from history.
The Similarities:
1) Both Hitler and Putin are revanchists—people obsessed with regaining lost territory and reincorporating it into their nation-state.
2) Both seek to return to a former state of glory—Hitler to Imperial Germany and Putin to the Soviet Bloc. More specifically, both men sought to reverse a geopolitical/military defeat: In Hitler's case, Germany's defeat in WWI and, in Putin's case, the USSR's collapse in the Cold War. Both men legitimate their regimes by seeking to reverse these “humiliations” and taking vengeance on the nations that they perceive as responsible for the period of economic hardship that immediately followed these defeats. In Hitler’s case, the economic hardships experienced under the Weimar Republic and in Putin’s Russia’s economic hardships during the 90s.
3) Hitler and Putin are both dictators. That said, Putin is more careful about maintaining a democratic facade while Hitler dispensed with it altogether.
4) Both men were willing to imprison or kill political opponents.
5) Both men have had foreign policy successes involving land grabs that were only nominally opposed by the rest of the world. These grabs were mainly peaceful until each man made a move that required a "war of limited duration" that had the potential to spiral out into a deadlier conflict.
6) Speculatively, in Putin's case, both men faced health problems that caused them to speed up their timetables. In Hitler's case, the disease was Parkinson's while in Putin's it appears to be either Parkinson's or pancreatic cancer.
7) Both were concerned with pursuing autarchic economic policies—partly out of a concern with the malicious intentions of "big finance."
8) Hitler and Putin seem to have both been intelligent men who lost some of that intelligence as leadership responsibilities and declining health exacerbated the defects in their personalities.
9) Hitler and Putin both have shown a willingness to engage in false flag operations to justify military campaigns their people might not otherwise support.
Adolf Hitler's false flag operation to initiate the war with Poland remains one of the most infamous examples of its kind in history. In 1939, Hitler's Nazi regime orchestrated an elaborate plan to create the appearance of a Polish attack on Germany. German operatives, dressed as Polish soldiers, attacked a German radio station in Gleiwitz and planted false evidence to implicate Poland. Hitler used this incident as a pretext to launch a full-scale invasion of Poland, marking the beginning of World War II. The Gleiwitz incident demonstrated Hitler's willingness to manipulate events to suit his expansionist goals, and it served as a catalyst for the devastating conflict that followed.
Vladimir Putin’s false flags, however, put Hitler’s to shame. It is unlikely that Hitler would have ever considered carrying out something like the controversial apartment bombings in 1999. A series of bombings occurred in several Russian cities, including Moscow and Volgodonsk, killing over 300 people. The Russian government blamed Chechen separatists for the attacks and used them to justify military intervention in Chechnya. However, FSB officials were later discovered placing real explosives at another apartment building---verified to be real explosives by a local branch office of the FSB itself.
10) Both men fostered a socially conservative vision for their countries, focusing on marriage and childrearing—to strengthen the nation through population growth.
11) Both men have a conspiratorial worldview that sees non-governmental actors as playing a significant role in world events—rather than seeing world events as almost entirely shaped by nation-states and economic/demographic forces. (This is not to say that this aspect of their thinking is necessarily incorrect—or that it might not be true now even if it was not true in Hitler's time). However, both men included demographics and economics in their thinking to some extent.
12) Hitler and Putin wished to acquire Ukraine—Hitler for its agriculture and "lebensraum" and Putin for its gas and oil reserves.
13) Both men justified starting wars to protect "countrymen stuck in hostile territory" who were ostensibly being oppressed. In Hitler's case, the German-speaking minority of Poland (esp. the ones in and near Danzig), and in Putin's, the Russian separatists of the Donbas. Moreover, both men started these wars after several rounds of relatively peaceful annexations—Georgia and Crimea for Putin and the Anschluss and Czechoslovakia for Hitler.
14) Both men were motivated to attach an exclave with important seaports to their home country via a land bridge, in Putin's case Crimea, and in Hitler's case East Prussia.
15) Update (6-3-2022) Both Hitler and Putin micromanaged their respective military campaigns and ignored the advice of their best military advisors.
16) Update(6-16-2022) Both Putin and Hitler prepared their initial aggression by allying with the other great dictator of their time; Putin with Xi and Hitler with Stalin.
17) Hitler wrote a terrible, and only partly thought out, book where he formulated his political and military program (along with a lesser known, untitled second book). On the other hand, Putin wrote an extended essay attempting to justify his invasion.
18) Both suffer(ed) from delusional beliefs about the world seeking to eliminate their respective ethnic groups: Indeed, Putin may be suffering from the greater delusion. There were, in fact, more people who wanted to destroy the German ethnicity than there are people who want to destroy Russia. The fact that Putin is, ostensibly, more paranoid than Hitler is not a great sign.
20) Update: Both men were irrational about taking certain towns despite having limited strategic value, Hitler Stalingrad and Putin Bakhmut.
21) Hitler and Putin tended to give positions of influence and power to close friends and political allies, rather than giving them to people who have proven their skill and talent.
22) Both men would pit their subordinates against each, giving them muddied and overlapping responsibilities. That said, the lack of formality among Putin’s inner circle is greater than that in Hitler’s—making the competition and rivalries arguably even more intense. While Hitler would assign the same tasks to multiple subordinates, the fact that there was more formal structure mitigated the rivalries somewhat. In short, Putin might rely on this technique even more than Hitler did.
23) Hitler and Putin both reneged on multiple peace agreements, causing them to lose their credibility in negotiations. Logically speaking, parties should negotiate when faced with war—and settle on the expected outcome of a given conflict in order to avoid the risks and costs of combat. However, when a party reneges on an agreement, the fact that gaining concessions changes the expected value of a future negotiation leads people to prefer war. If I let you grab territory you would probably win in a war, that increases your hand in the next negotiation—I can get gobbled up by piecemeal negotiations. This is what started WWII; and this is why Ukraine cannot come to the bargaining table while Putin remains in power. Reneging on agreements is a formula for war.
24) Both men decided to institute private armies that were not accountable to the regular government. In Hitler’s case, the SA and SS and in Putin’s case Wagner.
25) Putin and Hitler both sought to carry out their wars without disturbing the lives of ordinary citizens: Hitler was famously reluctant to put his economy on a war footing (which actually had some benefits as he did not implement counterproductive policies like rationing, but the case against rationing is complicated enough I will have to deal with it another time), and Putin has been the same. Hitler, on the other hand, was not afraid to draft people from all parts of the Germany Reich while Putin has conspicuously avoided drafting people from Moscow and St. Petersburg as much as possible, fully aware that the people of these cities are more politically active and aware than those of others. On the other hand, German elites, schooled in Prussian tradition, wanted to fight.
26) Update 8-25-23: Putin and Hitler both had to fend off rebellions carried out by the leaders of their private armies: Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner, in Putin’s case and Rohm, the leader of the SA, in Hitler’s. The main difference here is that Hitler managed to strike before Rohm carried out his coup while Putin was blindsided and had to settle for his revenge after.
27) Update 9-12-23: Both leaders fell for the trap of attacking civilians—something that wastes resources better suited to military targets; however, Hitler (if you ignore the complicated case of Warsaw where the attacks were part of a siege) only did so in response to the civilian bombing campaigns of the UK.
The Differences:
1) Putin does not see things in racial terms and is much less inclined to carry out "collective punishment" against populations based on their ethnicity. Hitler, on the other hand, clearly cared about "racial purity." For Putin, what matters is Russian culture—not, per se, Russian blood.
2) Similarly, Putin does not believe in any inherent Slavic superiority—though he does believe that Russia deserves to be a great power, but he does not believe that Russians have a special destiny that will lead them to rule over non-Russians. There is no doctrine of a "master race." However, the "master race" stuff—while a part of Nazi doctrine—is often overemphasized when discussing Hitler's view of the world. That, however, is a long topic that is certain to prove controversial, so I will leave it for another time.
3) Hitler was reluctant to use political assassination as a tool when dealing with foreign heads of state. As the use of Chechen hit squads demonstrates, Putin does not share this same taboo.
4) Putin moved much more slowly with his plans for Russian reunification than Hitler did with his plans for the German Reich. Putin has been the Russian government's head far longer than Hitler was fuhrer.
5) Hitler was staunchly anti-communist while still incorporating socialist elements into his economic program. On the other hand, Putin understands the weaknesses of communism (at least, up to a point), but he is not filled with innate animosity towards it. Indeed, he seems to harbor a certain nostalgia for communist ideals even if he considers them fundamentally unworkable.
6) While Putin has imprisoned and punished his political opponents, he has done so less enthusiastically than Hitler—and he has not created a separate penal system solely for this purpose (though regular criminals could also end up in concentration camps). Russia has nothing like Hitler's concentration camp system. Indeed, Putin is careful to imprison his opponents in the same penal system used for rapists and murderers—he does not want them to wear having been placed in a "special camp" as a badge of honor (as, let's say, Solzhenitsyn did) but instead wants them to be seen as ordinary thugs. So, while he is "better" than Hitler on this point, one can decipher a sort of cynical ruthlessness in his decision not to set up camps. Putin wants to confuse the public by conflating the distinction between true criminals and political prisoners.
7) Putin is not an antisemite. Hitler was. Some might consider sending Chechens to murder a Jewish man and his family an antisemitic act. I suppose it isn't as long as he hates him for some reason other than his being Jewish—like, for example, being a leader of "neo-nazis."
8) Putin does not share Hitler's hostility to Christianity and organized religion. Hitler wrote at length about how he despised the pacifism intrinsic in Christianity, while Putin seems to have authentic admiration for the Orthodox Christian Church.
9) Hitler attempted more seriously to negotiate with Poland before his invasion than Putin did with Ukraine. Hitler also wanted less from Poland territorially than Putin has already taken, let alone wants to take, from Ukraine: All Hitler wanted from Poland was Danzig and a railway corridor connecting Germany proper to East Prussia—Germany's exclave. It is not clear if Putin would be willing to accept, under any conditions, the existence of an independent Ukrainian state.
10) One of the most telling differences between Hitler and Putin, apart from their views on race and their attitudes towards Jews, is that Hitler actively encouraged political engagement from the German people while Putin—with the notable exception of his Victory Day celebrations—discourages it: Hitler sought political engagement and fanaticism while Putin seeks disengagement and apathy though with a patriotic aftertaste. (Update August 2023, that said, there are signs of growing militarization and politicization within Russia. So, this difference may erode over time.) In Hitler’s thinking, a politically engaged public who enthusiastically agreed with his ideas was the best path to regime security; in Putin’s, it is a public that sees politics as being outside their control. Where Hitler wanted adoration, Putin wants an avuncular apathy—men too cynical to ever bother overthrowing him.
Putin’s Nashi (Russian for “ours”) group pales in comparison to the Hitler Youth, for example; it completely lacks the paramilitary aspect and the thorough ideological training that Hitler’s organization had.
11) Putin is responsible for many fewer deaths than Hitler by many orders of magnitude—at least for now. Indeed, he is responsible for less death than Cheney and Bush, at least for now, which takes us to our final point.
12) Putin has nuclear weapons; Hitler never had those. A happy nuclear trigger finger could allow Putin to massively overtake Hitler's death toll in less than fifteen minutes.
Putin isn't Hitler, but saying that the men are not similar is just as false as saying they are entirely alike. He has more in common with Hitler than the "neo-Nazi" Ukrainian Jew Zelensky.
Most people think of Hitler not as the man who started WWII but as the man who carried out the Holocaust—people think of him as a paradigm of evil that represents the furthest reaches of human depravity and not a man who had geopolitical and philosophical motivations. It is this fact that makes it difficult to notice when other leaders, who are less depraved, are treading a similar path.
We should all remember that Hitler wasn't Hitler when the war started in 1939—he was only a shadow of the villain he would become. Putin may yet become much, much worse than he presently is.
Comparing Putin to Hitler may be unsettling, but acknowledging their similarities is not the same as equating them. Our intent is not to sensationalize but to learn from history. While Putin is not Hitler, the commonalities between these leaders serve as a stark reminder of the potential dangers that lurk in today's geopolitical landscape. To ignore these parallels would be a disservice to history and a potential hazard to global stability. Recognizing them enables us to critically assess the current situation, increasing the chances of averting conflict and promoting peace
Some people will nevertheless refuse to consider any comparison between Hitler and Putin—either because they simply reject all comparisons to Hitler as a matter of principle or because they cannot accept that they were blind to the dangers Putin presents. To them, I can only say this: If you won't compare Hitler to Putin, please be willing to compare 2022 to 1939; the future of the world might depend on it.
Further similarities, both Putin and Hitler issued no retreat orders---in defiance of his own commanders.