We haven't talked about Russia in a while...

So, Putin is defending the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty of 1939... while on a state visit to Poland, no less.

Many is the time we have argued the accuracy of "revisionist" interpretations of history, and if we can do it, there isn't any real reason why Putin can't either. But I'd love to hear his defense of the statement.

In light of the bigger issue, however, I feel this is another stunning example of Putin reaching for (what he perceives as) the "lost glory of the USSR". He wants "his" Russia to encapsulate all the "good" that was Russia (and the USSR) of the past, without accepting any of the responsibility for the "bad".

Last year, in a sanctioned article in a "mainstream" magazine, Joseph Stalin was listed as the 3rd "greatest" Russian of all time... even though he was born and raised just outside of Tblisi, Georgia. Putin has claimed that the fall of the USSR was the "greatest political catastrophe of the 20th Century." He has openly admitted to rebuilding the Russian military in a manner that would recapture the "national promise" of the Soviet-era... presumably, this means that Russia would again be able to project force into distant regions and theaters with impunity, as they did as late as 1988 under the Soviets. He spent hundreds of millions of rubles to plant a "flag" under the polar ice cap, "claiming" the ocean floor there as Russian.

Claiming that the "Western" Munich Agreement of '38 ended all possibility of an anti-Nazi alliance between the USSR and the West is something we can debate at our leisure, but when seen in the light of Putin's previous actions since 1999, I'd say that Russia is still a strategic and economic threat that no one in Washington right now is paying any attention to at all.