There is something quite eerie about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is eerie beyond the obvious injustice of a big power assaulting a sovereign state and attempting to dislodge a democratically installed government. I thought about it for a while and realized the real oddity of this invasion. Russia initiated a war of annexation native to the 20th century but fought in the 21st. Its final goal is to reinstate some version of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), itself a facsimile of the old Tsarist Russian Empire. Europe has not seen an invading army of this scale since the clo…