By TEE NGUGI

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Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for a “de-Nasification” of the country. The use of this term is a bruising insult to Ukraine’s national pride.

In World War II, Ukraine, then part of the defunct Soviet Union, suffered brutal occupation by Nazi Germany. When the Nazi army speedily occupied Ukraine, Adolf Hitler thought conquering the Soviet Union would be over in a few months, just like his campaign in France.

In racist arrogance, the Nazi leader instructed his army to treat Ukrainians as sub-human. For Putin, therefore, to refer to Ukraine as a country in the grips of neo-Nazism is to desecrate its history.

The scowling and brooding Putin, a former intelligence officer, is quoted as having said that his greatest regret in life was the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Since ascending to the presidency, his goal has been to make Russia — ironically, like Donald Trump in relation to America — great again.

Putin is especially irked by attempts by countries that were once part of the Soviet Union to deepen ties with the West and to shake off any lingering Russian influence. He has interpreted these ambitions through the Cold War prism of the West versus Russia. To him, these countries are increasingly becoming a gateway for Nato, the Cold War relic intended to protect western Europe from a possible attack by the Soviet Union.

Putin’s bullying will not win back the former Soviet republics. These countries think deepening ties with the West will guarantee their democracy and prosperity.

Therefore, a Russia that is increasingly inward-looking and less democratic will only further estrange them from their erstwhile compatriot.

If Putin wants to keep these states under his sphere of influence, then the way to do it is to grow the Russian economy, liberalise politics and offer a model of a rapidly modernising country.

But, having said that, the West’s reaction to Putin’s bullying has smacked hypocrisy. When Cuba, after the revolution, elected to be independent of American cultural and economic hegemony and forge ties with Moscow, the United States threatened to bomb the island nation.

Even when the Cubans abandoned building missile launching sites in their country, the US still tried to sabotage Havana and assassinate its leader Fidel Castro. Since then, the US has maintained a crippling economic embargo on Cuba in an attempt to bring the country back under American influence.

And when Chile attempted to break from American political and economic influence in the 1970s, the Americans engineered a right-wing putsch that brought the murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet to power.

Israel regularly destroys any presence of its enemies in neighbouring states with the full support of the West.

The inconvenient truth is: Moral outrage is dependent on a country’s geopolitical and economic interests. The world order would be more stable if there was a consistent standard against which the behaviour of nations was judged.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator