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Last Updated Mar 5, 2014 5:51 PM EST

Hillary Clinton likened Russia's recent military action in Ukraine to Nazi Germany's territorial aggression during the 1930s on Tuesday, according to a report from the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

The former secretary of state, speaking at a private fundraiser for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Long Beach, said Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to occupy Ukraine's Crimean peninsula under the pretext of protecting ethnic Russians there is similar to "what Hitler did back in the 1930s." (The Los Angeles News Group posted an audio recording of Clinton's remarks on Wednesday.)

"The ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they're not being treated right, I must go and protect my people," Clinton said. "And that's what's gotten everybody so nervous."

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Clinton also cited Putin's decision to issue Russian passports to Russians in Ukraine as another similarity to Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler

One attendee told Buzzfeed that Clinton said there is "no indication that Putin is as irrational as the instigator of World War II," but that his actions were still very "destabilizing."

Putin "believes his mission is to restore Russian greatness," Clinton said, according to the Press-Telegram. "When he looks at Ukraine, he sees a place that he believes is by its very nature part of Mother Russia."

Clinton said any negotiation must not sanction Russia's effective annexation of Crimea. "So it's a real nail-biter, right now, but nobody wants to up the rhetoric," she said. "Everybody wants to cool it in order to find a diplomatic solution and that's what we should be trying to do."

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Hillary Clinton on Ukraine: Russia behaving like Nazi Germany