> Putin did, however, explain what Hitler's motivation was, The Free City of Danzig.

That was an excuse, not motivation. Hitler was motivated by theories of racial superiority, which he immediately began carrying out in Poland after invading the country and dividing it with the USSR, which had attacked Poland from the east in a supporting action (they even held a joint victory parade). Hitler sought to exterminate all Jews and most Poles living in Poland and turn the few remaining Poles into a slave race serving German settlers, who were given Polish farms and businesses. Hitler managed to murder roughly 3 million Polish Jews and 3 million Poles before finding a sorry end in a petrol-filled ditch somewhere in Berlin. Systemic extermination of people living in Poland had been planned for years in advance and started right on the first days of the invasion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion

Russian theories of superiority, exceptionalism and Russki mir are eerily similar to the German ideas of superiority and Lebensraum in both theory and practice:

Operation Tannenberg (German: Unternehmen Tannenberg) was a codename for one of the anti-Polish extermination actions by Nazi Germany. The shootings were conducted with the use of a proscription list (Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen) targeting Poland’s elite, compiled by the Gestapo in the two years before the invasion of Poland. The secret lists identified more than 61,000 members of the Polish elite: activists, intelligentsia, scholars, clergy, actors, former officers and others, who were to be interned or shot. Members of the German minority living in Poland assisted in preparing the lists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tannenberg

USSR did the same in the parts of Poland they invaded:

The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. /---/ The order to execute captive members of the Polish officer corps was secretly issued by the Soviet Politburo led by Joseph Stalin. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be "intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre

And the same thing is going on in occupied parts of Ukraine right now:

In a deliberate, widespread campaign, Russian forces systematically targeted influential Ukrainians, nationally and locally, to neutralize resistance through detention, torture and executions, an Associated Press investigation has found. The strategy appears to violate the laws of war and could help build a case for genocide. Russian troops hunted Ukrainians by name, using lists prepared with the help of their intelligence services. In the crosshairs were government officials, journalists, activists, veterans, religious leaders and lawyers. /---/ The pattern was similar across the country, according to testimonies AP collected from occupied and formerly occupied territories around Kyiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv and Donetsk regions.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/russians-hunt-dow...