People thought they would be spared if they surrendered to the Nazis. That sure turned out well for them huh? There are many situations in life where it's not worth fighting. Fending off foreign aggression is not one of those times. If they're invading, they have absolutely no care for your safety and they have no higher authority to fear for anything they do to you.
Genocide was an inherent part of Nazi ideology, though, and the NSDAP had openly declared its contempt for many of the people it conquered. There hasn't been anything comparable to Hitler or Nazism in any of Russia's wars.
Raphael Lemkin (who coined the word genocide) recognized the Ukrainian Holodomor and applied the term 'genocide' in his 1953 article "Soviet Genocide in Ukraine".
The Russians have murdered much more people in the Eastern European countries that they have occupied than the Nazis ever have. If the Nazis had not been defeated relatively quickly they might have killed much more, but as it happened, the victorious Russians had much more years available to kill everybody who was believed as able to oppose them. Totaled over all the Eastern Europe and the various minorities of Soviet Union, many millions of people, mostly those being the formerly well-educated professionals of the occupied countries, have been either killed immediately or imprisoned, and most have died during detention.
The only difference between the Nazis and the Russians has been that the Russians were more careful to hide many of their actions and as former allies of USA, unlike the Nazis, they have not been the subjects of so many movies or novels describing their crimes during WWII and during the first decades after WWII.
I agree that I was referring to the behavior of the former USSR and of the earlier Russian empire, so to the last few centuries until Gorbachev, not to the present Russia.
Nevertheless, unlike Germany, which has apologized publicly many times for what the Nazis have done, and which has paid consistent reparations for a part of the victims of the Nazis, neither Putin nor any other Russian leader has ever apologized for any past actions of Russia. Paying reparations would be even more unconceivable for the Russians, who continue to claim that they have "liberated" the people whom they have enslaved after WWII.
I have seen nothing in the public speeches of Putin that would indicate that he would ever behave in relation with an invaded territory differently than it was traditional for the Soviet Union leaders or for the earlier Russian tsars.
Until the man himself would say and act otherwise, in a credible way, the only rational assumption is that an invading Russia will behave like always in the past.
