To anyone who recalls Danzig and the Sudetenland – the endless nationality claims and counter-claims that triggered World War II in the borderlands of Eastern Europe – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revanchism in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014 has a disturbingly familiar ring to it. His rhetoric of humiliation and encirclement, the instrumental talk of minority rights, and the Kremlin’s use of local proxies, with all of the uncertainties that accompany reliance on such actors – all of this was reminiscent of nothing so much as interwar Germany’s own irredentist policies.