As American spymaster Jack Devine points out, Putin’s career took shape in Dresden, East Germany, ensconced in the Warsaw Pact world and he has called the Soviet empire’s collapse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the ”.

Source: https://www.rawstory.com/xi-and-putin-meeting-signals-the-return-of-the-china-russia-axis-and-the-start-of-a-second-cold-war/

In 1961, East Germany sealed off the border between Berlin’s eastern and western sectors before building a wall that would divide the city for the next 28 years.

Source: https://www.limaohio.com/archive/2023/08/13/today-in-history-august-13-east-germany-seals-the-border/

In East Germany if your neighbors over heard you listening to Radio Free Europe they would report you to the Stasi (secret police), and you would be disappeared.

Source: https://japantoday.com/category/world/ukrainian-officials-report-russian-missile-attack-on-kyiv

Lothar de Maiziere, the first and only democratically elected leader of East Germany, at a German reunification celebration on October 3rd, 2020.

Source: https://www.thelocal.de/20220930/unity-day-how-october-3rd-became-germanys-national-holiday

Rasmussen's rationale included the fact that while Germany today is a NATO member, originally, only West Germany was admitted to NATO, in 1955, while East Germany remained in the Soviet sphere of influence.

Source: https://news.err.ee/1609163887/experts-reject-former-nato-sec-gen-proposal-for-ukraine-joining-without-occupied-zones

The scenarios, not mutually exclusive, range from what could be his biggest nightmare -- a coup or uprisings like those he saw as a KGB agent in East Germany in 1989, in the USSR in 1991 or Ukraine in 2004 and 2014 -- to winning reelection next year.

Source: https://www.gjsentinel.com/news/us/putins-ukraine-gamble-seen-as-biggest-threat-to-his-rule/article_a4e3c225-9e2b-5ce3-9707-2196ac6668db.html

They chose a Trabant 601E as their preferred method of transport, one of about three million manufactured in communist East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-67079996?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA