Russia’s invasion of neighbouring Ukraine brought “echoes” of the territorial ambitions of Nazi Germany that sparked the Second World War, a former Royal Navy officer who served with Nato said yesterday.

Alan Brooks, a Bermudian Royal Navy helicopter pilot and later commanding officer of HMS London during the Bosnian War in the mid-1990s, warned that the response to Russian aggression had to be “robust” because “history showed that appeasement doesn’t work”.

Captain Brooks was speaking hours after news of the invasion – Europe’s first armed confrontation between major powers since the Second World War and its first significant crisis since the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s – broke.

Captain Brooks said: “This is a war between Europeans and Europeans, and the $64,000 question is what’s next?”

He added that he had met Russian naval officers during his peacekeeping duties as part of Britain’s commitment to the Nato force sent in after Yugoslavia disintegrated into warring factions.

Captain Brooks said: “Russians are a people driven by a tremendous sense of history and you heard that in Putin’s speech a couple of days ago when he referred to how Lenin was the architect in the creation of what is known as Ukraine.

“His reference to Ukraine as part of a Russian empire was exactly why the Bolsheviks killed the tsar in 1917. They were part of a Russian empire and wanted to get rid of it.”

He agreed Mr Putin could have seen Nato as a threat after it expanded into Eastern Europe in the wake of the collapse of the USSR.

But Captain Brooks said he had never heard of Nato being “expected to take offensive action as opposed to defensive action”.

He warned, however, that the Russian president was a former head of the feared Soviet Union-era KGB intelligence service.

Captain Brooks said: “He is used to operating in a completely different world and thinking in a completely different way – that’s part of the problem we have in not being able to understand him.”

But he added: “It would be incorrect for anybody to think that there would be further expansion to the east unless the countries to the east asked for it.

“One might ask why. I think it’s to enhance their own security.”

A Nato threat to Russia has been a regular refrain from Mr Putin.

But Captain Brooks said: “The concept of Nato doing anything pre-emptive does not carry any water in my opinion.”

He added: “There are unsubstantiated reports that a lot of Russian generals are uneasy fighting their own race, because they are all Slavic people, despite their language differences.

“It’s very sad. The big question now is, does Putin stop?

“Does he recreate only a bit of the Iron Curtain, or does he want more?

“What do the Russian people want and does he care what the Russian people want?

“As I said, they have a sense of history that is not entirely prevalent in our own society.”

Captain Brooks said his gut instinct was that there was a “great similarity between what has happened to the Ukraine and what happened to Poland and Czechoslovakia” at the outbreak of the Second World War.

He added that Adolf Hitler, the German dictator, saw the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War as “an unjust peace”.

Captain Brooks said: “Hitler poked and prodded to see what reaction he would get. He annexed the Sudetenland and Alsace-Lorraine, invaded Poland, went into Belgium, and eventually brought the Allies into the Second World War

“There is an echo in history in what Putin is doing now.

“He wants to achieve greater respect for Russia and will test others to see what kind of reaction he gets.”

But Captain Brooks warned: “He would miscalculate if he went into a Nato country.”

He said it appeared Mr Putin harboured a sense of grievance that Russia had been cheated of its rights.

Captain Brooks added: “There are echoes – for reasons not entirely clear to me, Putin feels that.

“Coming from someone with one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, that seems strange.”

He admitted that he had not left the Bosnian theatre of operations with the belief it would be Europe’s last conflict.

Captain Brooks said: “I don’t think it’s in the nature of mankind, or it’s in the nature of mankind generally – but there will be characters that want to make their name in history and drag the rest of us along.”

He added: “In a peculiar kind of way, we have enjoyed peace for so long that we have forgotten what a horrible thing war is.”