Watching recent events (and inspired by this tweet about Latvia's PM's take on this), I am reminded of a famous misquotation from the American war in Vietnam: "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Seems like Putin's Russia is killing the kin in order to save them. The attacks on the Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine are hurting those that Russia is supposedly trying to help. This speaks to a variety of ethnic/irredentist dynamics. First, when a country tries to reclaim supposedly lost territory, the ethnic kin in the lost territory don't have to demand this effort but it does...
![Russian Irredentism: Killing Kin To Save the Kin?](https://i0.wp.com/www.duckofminerva.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/The_Russian_Empire_at_its_greatest_extent.png?resize=1000%2C675&ssl=1)