Putin later admitted that Russian conventional forces, mainly those that had already been garrisoned in Crimea under a preexisting treaty with Ukraine, but added to by incoming Special Forces and intelligence officers, did indeed stage a near-bloodless takeover of European soil. But rather than an Anschluss, Putin cast this act of aggression in a purely defensive light. (Hitler had done much the same thing in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938.) This physical siege was both preceded and accompanied by a psychological one.
