When everything old is new again.
Early in 1968, more than thirty KGB illegals slipped into Czechoslovakia, with orders from the KGB’s chief, Yuri Andropov, to sabotage the Czech reform movement, infiltrate “reactionary” intellectual circles, and abduct prominent supporters of the Prague Spring. Most of these agents traveled disguised as Western tourists, since it was assumed that the Czech “agitators” would be more likely to reveal their plans to apparently sympathetic foreigners. Among the targets were intellectuals, academic, journalists, students, and writers, including Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel. It was the largest intelligence operation the KGB had ever mounted against a Warsaw Pact ally.
— The Spy and the Traitor, by Ben Macintyre, pp. 30 – 31
The heartbreaking denouement:
On the night of August 20, 1968, 2000 tanks and more than 200,000 troops, principally Soviet but with contingents from other Warsaw Pact countries, rolled across the Czechoslovakian frontiers. There was no hope of opposing the Soviet juggernaut, and Alexander Dubcek called upon his people not to resist.
— The Spy and the Traitor, p. 32
Ukraine could easily have gone that way, but instead its people chose to resist.
Kanlaon 