Exposing Putin's Lie About His Plan to "Denazify" Ukraine

When Putin announced his military operation invasion of Ukraine, most of us were surprised to hear him justify it by claiming that his goal was to "denazify" the country. Three weeks later, one of the Russian president's demands for ending the war is that Ukraine must engage in "de-Nazification." 

The reason this makes no sense is that President Zelensky, who was elected with 73% of the vote, is not only Jewish, his grandfather fought against the Nazis during World War II. 

As is often the case, a bit of history helps us understand what's going on. Last year, Timothy Snyder, an author and historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust, wrote about something called "memory laws."

Early memory laws were generally designed to protect the truth about victim groups. The most important example, passed in West Germany in 1985, criminalized Holocaust denial. Perhaps unsurprisingly, other countries followed that precedent, and banned the denial of other historical atrocities. The West German law was controversial to some advocates of freedom of speech; succeeding measures were disputed on the grounds that the Holocaust was in a special category. Yet these early laws could be defended as attempts to protect the weaker against the stronger, and an endangered history against propaganda.

But Snyder goes on the point out how Russia turned the whole purpose of memory laws upside down.

During Russia’s [2014] invasion of Ukraine, Putin signed into law the misleadingly named “Law Against Rehabilitation of Nazism.” Its premise was that the tribunals at Nuremberg, where some Nazis were tried, had passed exhaustive judgment on the atrocities of the 1930s and ’40s. The law specifically banned, with criminal penalties, “false information on the activities of the Soviet Union during the Second World War.” In other words, any mention of crimes not judged at Nuremberg could be equated to a denial of Nazi atrocities. No Soviet actions were judged there, of course, because the Soviets were among the victors and the judges.

To justify his previous invasion of Ukraine, Putin passed a "memory law" that protected the powerful by criminalizing any attempt to write critically about Stalin (ie, the Holodomor) or honestly about the Second World War, all under the guise of opposing the rehabilitation of Nazism.

Since 2014, Russia has also regularly proposed a non-binding resolution at the UN on "combating the glorification of Nazisim." They then condemn the U.S. and Ukraine for voting against it. In addition to calling it an attack on free speech, here is how the U.S. Mission to the United Nations justifies their position:

Today, however, the United States must once again express opposition to this resolution, a document most notable for its thinly veiled attempts to legitimize Russian disinformation campaigns denigrating neighboring nations and promoting the distorted Soviet narrative of much of contemporary European history, using the cynical guise of halting Nazi glorification. 

As a result, this is a good example of how the term "Nazi" is used in Russia these day.

Orwellian propaganda permeates #Russia's state TV.

Panelist claims: "Joe Biden is a Nazi. U.S. Congressmen⁠—Democrat and Republican⁠—are Nazis... German Chancellor is a Nazi... EU leaders are Nazis... because their sanctions are attempting to preserve Neo-Nazism in Ukraine." pic.twitter.com/4SilwB73O0

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) March 2, 2022

All of this talk about neo-Nazism in Ukraine started almost immediately after the Euromaiden movement was successful in ousting Putin's puppet, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. On his way to asylum in Russia, Yanukovych recorded a video message in Russian, claiming that he was the victim of a Nazi coup. Timothy Snyder explained how that happened.

The Ukrainian far right did play an important part in the revolution...One of the moral atrocities of the Yanukovych regime was to crush opposition from the center-right, and support opposition from the far right. By imprisoning his major opponents from the legal political parties, most famously Yulia Tymoshenko, Yanukovych was able to make of democracy a game in which he and the far right were the only players.

The far right, a party called Svoboda, grew larger in these conditions, but never remotely large enough to pose a real challenge to the Yanukovych regime in democratic elections. In this arrangement Yanukovych could then tell gullible westerners that he was the alternative to the far right.

While it's important to recognize the neo-Nazi faction in Ukraine, it is also important to put it in some perspective. The Svoboda Party now holds one seat out of 450 in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine's parliament). Here's what Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis told NPR:

Russia amped up the Nazi narrative after seizing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014...But Lautman estimates nationalists make up about 2% of Ukraine's population, with the vast majority having very little interest in anything to do with them. She said the U.S. probably has a higher percentage of white supremacist and Nazi groups.

None of that has stopped a meeting of the minds between what we might call the "alt-left" and the "alt-right" to parrot Putin's talking points. From the former, including people like Aaron Maté, we hear that the Euromaidan Revolution was really a coup orchestrated by the United States and Ukrainian neo-Nazis. After completely ignoring the rise of neo-Nazis in this country during Trump's presidency, Glenn Greenwald has been obsessed lately with pointing to their presence in Ukraine. 

When it comes to the alt-right, Marjorie Taylor Green recently went on a Twitter rant about how "Dems have been funding *actual* Nazis since the Obama/Biden administration," including a link to an article at The Nation. She went on to point to the U.S. refusal to vote for Russia's UN resolution on "combating the glorification of Nazisim" and to suggest that NATO funding for Ukraine is going to neo-Nazis (using this hashtag: #NATONazis). It very well could have been a rant written by Maté or Greenwald.

After being caught a little flat-footed by Putin's invasion of Ukraine, his apologists on both the far left and right are back to spouting the Kremlin's line unapologetically. That's why it is important to know the truth. When Putin talks about his goal to "denazify" Ukraine, it isn't just a lie. It is his way of demonizing anyone he deems to be an enemy. As one historian told NPR, "You need to dehumanize the other before you are going to murder them, and this is what's happening now."

So every time I hear about Nazis in Ukraine from Putin or any of his apologists, I'm going to think of the picture up above of President Zelensky, a Jew who was elected with 73% of the vote, visiting Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial in Kyiv.