Putin's parents survived the siege of Leningrad. Why does he presume an independent Ukraine won't?

The same urban siege tactics killed his brother Viktor, nearly killed his mother Maria—and, in the end, failed.

Maria Shelomova Putin and her son Vladimir Vladimirovich, aged five or six, in 1958.

Elderly women huddled against bitter cold picking their way through rubble spilling from the smoking ruins of an apartment building. Stiffened bodies lying grotesquely askew on broken pavement. Household belongings strewn on the ground, backlit by roaring flames. Hollow-eyed children struggling from bomb shelters to line up for food, water.

I could be describing Ukraine today, but actually I’m describing Leningrad under siege by the Wehrmacht during World War II. For 872 days, from 1941 to early 1944, Hitler’s Nazi forces sought to pummel into submission the city known today as St. Petersburg. Rather than assault the city directly, the Germans systematically starved and shelled its civilians. Pleas to allow humanitarian relief to reach the city were rebuffed; refugees fleeing along the one escape route were gunned down. During the first winter when the outside temperature fell to 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, 100,000 people a month died of hunger and cold. Daily rations were three thin slices of bread adulterated with sawdust. When the siege was lifted, only 700,000 Leningraders of the city’s prewar population of 3.5 million remained alive.

One of these survivors was the woman who would become Vladimir Putin’s mother.

Like thousands of other mothers, Maria Shelomova Putin had left her young son Viktor in a children’s shelter while she scavenged for food. Viktor died of diphtheria; Maria, weakened by lack of food, fainted near a pile of corpses and awakened just in time to avoid being dragged off to a mass grave.

Towards the end, Maria was too weak to walk. But she and Leningrad’s other survivors grimly held on. Her husband, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, was wounded badly at the front by a German grenade but survived. Seven years after the war ended the Putins had another son, Vladimir Vladimirovich. He grew up to be the president of Russia.

A somber ceremony was held three years ago at the city’s Piskarevsky Cemetery, a memorial to those who died in the siege. From a distance of 75 years, the survivors of the Leningrad siege are seen as heroes. People came to lay flowers and slices of bread on the rows of grave sites. The president of Russia laid a bouquet of roses and gave a speech. “I don't even know where my own brother is buried, whom I never saw, never knew,” Putin said. “It is very likely that he is buried here somewhere.” Describing the “horrendous” suffering of Leningraders inflicted by the Nazi siege, Putin declared: “This is what is called a crime against humanity.”

Can’t argue with that. But I do wonder about the state of mind of a man who adopts the same urban siege tactics that killed his brother and nearly killed his mother—and that failed in the end. Did the man now waging siege warfare against cities in Ukraine notice that nobody under the Nazi siege of Leningrad gave up? Surely, Hitler believed Leningraders—and citizens of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), also under siege—would break, would surrender, would welcome the invaders in return for bread. They were desperate. They ate wallpaper paste (believed to be made from potatoes) and lipstick. They ate cats and dogs. They boiled shoes and briefcases to make thin protein jelly. They cut pieces off corpses and at them (260 people were reportedly arrested for cannibalism). Petty crime and corruption flourished. Tens of thousands fell in the streets and froze where they lay and the bodies piled up. It was ugly, hell beyond our imagining, all caused by one malignant German tyrant.

But those who lived did not break. There’s a lesson here, Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Given that Putin’s own forces in Ukraine are said to be suffering from shortages of food and fuel, the Russian president might recall that the German army besieging Leningrad was beaten; tens of thousands of German soldiers, freezing and starving, were taken prisoner. Tens of thousands more died in captivity.

Putin didn’t likely set out to lay siege to Ukraine’s cities. But his apparent plan, an air and armored assault to seize Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv and other urban centers, was frustrated by unanticipated Ukrainian resistance. Now Putin’s soldiers, his armor and artillery are bogged down and unable to reach their strategic goals. They are “digging in around the periphery of Kyiv and elsewhere,” according to the authoritative Institute for the Study of War, “attempting to consolidate political control over areas they currently occupy, resupplying and attempting to reinforce units in static positions, and generally beginning to set conditions to hold in approximately their current forward positions for an indefinite time.”

Just like the German army at Leningrad.