- Nancy Pelosi called Putin's invasion of Ukraine an "evil move" and compared his actions to those of Hitler.
- "This is the Sudetenland," said Pelosi, referring to a region of Czechoslovakia that Hitler invaded before WWII.
- Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in 1939, claiming to be protecting German-speaking citizens.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi forcefully condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, calling his invasion of Ukraine "a very evil move" before implicitly comparing him to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
"Many of us have visited Ukraine and have seen that they love democracy," Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press conference following her return from several countries overseas, including the United Kingdom and Germany. "They do not want to live under Vladimir Putin. He does not want the Russian people to see what democracy looks like. And therefore he wants to bring them under his domain."
Pelosi also made the case that Putin, by virtue of his background as a Russian intelligence officer, is particularly skilled at deceiving his own citizens.
"Putin is a master of KGB, KGB, KGB, KGB," Pelosi said, pounding the podium. "His orientation is misrepresentation, and he's effective at that, unless we inoculate against it, unless we make a case against it so that the Russian people know the truth."
She then went on to compare Putin's recognition of the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine — two thirds of which are still controlled by Ukraine — to Hitler's invasion of German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia in 1939.
"This is a very evil move on the part of Vladimir Putin," she declared. "He's a KGB guy who happens to be probably the richest man in the world because of his exploitation of his own people that he doesn't want them to know about."
"This, my friends, is our moment," she added. "This is the Sudetenland, that's what people were saying there. You cannot ignore what Putin is doing."
She added that Putin's invasion is a "total assault on democracy."
—Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 23, 2022
The Sudetenland is an area that was populated primarily by German speakers in Czechoslovakia (now broken up into Czechia and Slovakia).
After assuming power in 1933, Hitler threatened to spark a new war in Europe by demanding that the Sudetenland be ceded to Germany. European powers eventually gave into Hitler's demands via the Munich Pact in 1938, in what would ultimately be a failed bid to prevent another conflict from consuming the continent. Nazi Germany would go on to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, just months before the onset of World War II.
Pelosi argued that the world hasn't seen the full weight of the Biden administration's sanctions. She aligned herself with a growing bipartisan consensus in going after Russian oligarchs in a very personal way.
"You haven't seen the depth of these sanctions yet," Pelosi said, adding that Putin could very well be the "richest man in the world." "Follow the money in this and that's what the sanctions are about … when they see how they're gonna be undermined, how these visas are going to work on how they can travel and have residences in every opulent place in the world."
Putin's iron grip on power is widely attributed to the loyalty of some of Russia's richest men who amassed fortunes in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse and the liberalization of the Russian economy. Officials have expressed hope that more personally punishing key oligarchs could undermine Putin's support among this powerful set.
Biden has said the current sanctions could be just the first step if Russia continues to escalate its actions. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeatedly said the US will ramp up its pressure if Moscow furthers its invasion.