‘Fuhrer 2022’: Drudge Compares Putin to Hitler as Russian Leader Continues Bloody Onslaught into Ukraine

Matt Drudge’s highly influential news aggregation website, Drudge Report, led its coverage of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine Friday with the headline “FUHRER 2022” and lead image of Vladimir Putin altered to look like Adolf Hitler.

Drudge, the reclusive internet blogger turned conservative media powerhouse, started the Drudge Report in 1995 as a weekly subscriber-based email newsletter and became a household name soon after when it became the first outlet to break the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal.

Drudge, with its center-right leaning, links to various online media outlets across the country and the world and is known for its eye-grabbing headline writing style. The “FUHRER 2022” headline links to a Washington Post article — republished on MSN.com so there is no paywall — titled “Putin’s attack on Ukraine echoes Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia.”

The article by Michael Ruane chronicles recent commentators, historians, and analysts comparing Hitler’s demand to free German-speaking citizens of Czechoslovakia in the Sudetenland to Putin’s historically revisionist claim that he is freeing Russians in Ukrainian-held territories.

Ruane details the historical context, writing:

“I must also declare before the German people that in the Sudeten German problem my patience is now at an end,” Hitler said on Sept. 26, 1938. Czechoslovakia must “give the Germans their freedom, or we will get this freedom for ourselves.”

Four days later, during the famous Munich conference — now known as the centerpiece of the “appeasement” of the Nazis — Great Britain, France, and Italy agreed to the handover of the Sudeten region to Germany, hoping it would prevent further aggression.

Putin clearly aware of the comparison chose to gaslight the world ahead of his full-scale invasion of the country by calling Ukraine’s Democratically elected government “a gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.” The comments drew international condemnation as many noted that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is in fact Jewish and his grandfather fought the Nazis in the Soviet Army.

Drudge’s comparison of Putin to Hitler echoes remarks made by President George H.W. Bush ahead of the Gulf War in November of 1990. Bush, while building his coalition of allies to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, compared Hussein to the infamous Nazi leader.

While campaigning during the 1990 midterms, Bush told Americans that Hussein’s actions ″are held in direct contravention of international law. Many of them reportedly staked out as human shields near possible military targets, brutality that I don’t believe Adolf Hitler ever participated in anything of that nature.″