To expand on this and compare to WW2 history, Germany invaded both Poland and France, but the rhetoric around both was very different.

For Poland, there is the Obersalzberg Speech[1], where he said in part:

Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?

(The irony of the final sentence on this very discussion about the annihilation of the Armenians is not lost on me!)

Compare that to Hitler's speech about the conquest of France:

The German Army does not come as an enemy of the French people nor of its soldiers, nor does it intend to govern these territories. It has a single aim-to repel together with its allies any landing attempt by the Anglo-American forces.

Marshal Petain and his government are entirely free and are in the position to fulfill their duty as in the past. From now on nothing stands in the way of realization of their requests, made earlier, to come to Versailles to govern France from there.

The German forces have been ordered to see to it that the French people are inconvenienced as little as possible.[2]

The difference is very clear! And the French speech was made after the Poland one.

Which is more like Putain's denial of the right of Ukraine to be a country?

Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions. As recently as February 2020, he once again stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians “are one and the same people”, and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference. Similarly, Russia’s then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been “no state” in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis.[3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Obersalzberg_Speech

[2] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adolf-hitler-appeal-to-...

[3] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/07/01/there-is-no-ukraine...