Kremlin Propaganda on Denazification Carried Out in Ukraine Reiterated

In the report on manipulation of foreign information, the European External Action Service specifies that one of the most frequently used narratives is “Ukraine is a Nazi and a terrorist country”, and that it supported such groups. The EUvsDisinfo database contains almost 500 examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation claims about “Nazi/Fascist Ukraine”. As a reminder, Ukraine banned the promotion of Nazism back in 2015

 

A post on Facebook is spreading the well-known Kremlin manipulation that the war in Ukraine is owed to its denazification. That enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin to call the military invasion ”special military operation”, constantly trying to justify its use of military force.

IT SEEMS LIKE THE FA***T FROM THE LGBT DOES NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT DENAZIFICATION MEANS, stresses the post alluding to Foreign Affairs Minister Timcho Mucunski.

The reason for such an offensive and discriminatory post was Mucunski’s statement given in Washington during the NATO Summit that Macedonia remains Ukraine’s partner, not only from a political, but also from a defense and security point of view.

The thesis that Russia is implementing denazification in Ukraine is not true and it is a propaganda floscule presented by Putin himself to justify the military operation in Ukraine initiated on that date, completely unprovoked. Many historians claim that the military aggression in Ukraine cannot be correlated with any kind of denazification.

Putin is misusing the term “denazify”. Denazification refers to a particular moment in time in the post-war era, and Putin’s use of the term is propaganda aimed at his fears about the current democratic government in Ukraine. There’s a very specific historical meaning to denazification, a process that happened in Germany after the Second World War, says Timothy Snyder, an expert on Ukraine and author of “The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America” for Time Magazine.

He added that at the time in West Germany there was a certain amount of attention paid to high Nazi officials by the Americans and an attempt to remove them from public life.

Using it as Putin does, out of context, is an attempt to transform the country and the people he’s talking about, into Nazi Germany. A Nazi is a member of the National Socialist Party in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, he added.

Yale University professor Jason Stanley says that denazification was a process that the Allies carried out in Germany. Beginning with the Nuremberg trials, they tried and convicted a number of Nazis, a number were executed and then they replaced Nazi ideology in all the major institutions with people who were untainted by Nazism.

They replaced them with leaders who are loyal to democracy and they replaced Nazi ideology with democratic practices, he stated.

Omer Bartov, a Brown University professor, points out that after the Allies occupied Germany, they did investigate some former members of the Nazi party.

What Putin tries to rely on is the fact that there are extreme right-wing elements in Ukraine that could conceivably be described as Neo-Nazi. But these are fringe elements.

The Azov Battalion was established in May 2014 as a military unit. As specified by Al Jazeera, 10 years ago it was an extreme right-wing military unit whose members were ultranationalists accused for an ideology close to white race supremacy. The unit was formed as a voluntary group led by Andriy Biletsky, and it consisted of the ultranationalist group “Patriot of Ukraine”, including a group of persons who were followers of Neo-Nazi ideology. As elaborated by Al Jazeera, both groups then in the Azov Battalion had Neo-Nazi and xenophobic ideals and physically attacked migrants, Roma and other people. As a battalion the group fought against the pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine.

But that was before and around the period of the initial military activities in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015. Today Azov is a unit – in fact several military units – that are part of the regular armed forces. Recently, even the State Department removed the Azov Battalion from the list of formations that were not supposed to receive arms from the USA exactly due to the comprehensive transformation of the unit.

Today, extreme nationalist forces in Ukraine are very small. They are also present in many European countries, including Russia and the Russian Armed Forces, for example Rusich Group, led by the war criminal Alexey Milchakov, who has openly declared himself a Nazi in interviews. In contemporary Ukraine, extreme nationalist groups have no influence over the Parliament. In the last elections, they won a minimum number of votes, insufficient to enter the Parliament, nor are they part of the government, hence cannot serve as justification for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The report on manipulation of foreign information, the European External Action Service states that one of the most frequently used narratives is: ”Ukraine is a Nazi and a terrorist country”, and that it also supported such groups.

The EUvsDisinfo database contains almost 500 examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation claims about “Nazi/Fascist Ukraine”.

As a reminder, Ukraine banned the promotion of Nazism in 2015.

Russia attacked Ukraine, and Ukraine is entitled to defend itself. Democratically developed member states of NATO and the EU, including Macedonia, of course, as a NATO member state are helping the country.

Due to all of the above-noted facts, the post we are fact-checking, specifically the claim about the existence or implementation of some kind of “denazification” in Ukraine by means of military actions on the part of the Russian Army is assessed as untrue. There is no – not even slightly significant – Nazi movement in Ukraine, nor there is deep rooted Nazi ideology that should be exterminated by means of “denazification”.

 

 

 

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