Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine shocked the world. While US intelligence had warned that an attack was imminent, few anticipated that the Russian president would launch a full-scale war that could result only in destruction and disaster. In the Czech Republic, too, the initial reaction from politicians and most of the population was characterized by strong opposition to Putin and an outpouring of sympathy with Ukrainians.

For many Czechs like my mother, the invasion stirred painful memories of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, ending the country’s short fight for a liberalized socialism. When I phoned her a few days after the invasion, she recalled her memories of when, at age seven, she looked on terrified as Soviet tanks rolled down the main road of her hometown.

Another parallel widely used in Czech politics is the Munich agreement of 1938, a defining moment in the country’s twentieth-century history. There, Britain and France agreed to give Hitler the Czech borderlands where Germans were supposedly oppressed. The Nazi leader persuaded them that he just needed to liberate the Germans who had lived in the Sudetenland for centuries — before swallowing up the rest of the country a few months later.