re: #266 Belafon

Someone on DK I think gave a good part of the reason Putin is doing this: A truly Democratic Ukraine would cause Putin all sorts of problems domestically.

Also, there’s been rumors for several years that Putin suffers from some malady (the most common of those rumors is Parkinson’s Disease, but there’s stories about cancer scares as well) and that he figures he needs to act now while he’s still in relatively good health.

It’s been suggested that one motivation for Hitler’s rush to war in 1939 was his hypochondria - he was apparently obsessed with the notion that he was going to die of cancer (no doubt caused by the trauma of his mother’s untimely death from breast cancer) and that if he didn’t act right then and there, then Germany would have no future.