As the crisis in Belarus has unfolded over the past month, there has been a growing sense of deja vu about the Russian response. Officials and media in Moscow have attacked the Belarusian pro-democracy protests as the work of extremists and foreign agents, while at the same time warning of a nationalist threat and drawing emotionally explosive parallels to the WWII Soviet struggle against Nazism. These narratives are not new. They directly echo the Kremlin reaction to the 2004 and 2014 pro-democracy uprisings in neighboring Ukraine.
