Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a speech Thursday announcing broad attacks on Ukraine, said the purpose of the “military operation” was to “denazify” the country — the leader of which, President Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and had family members die in the Holocaust.
Three of Zelensky’s great uncles were killed in the German Nazi party-led genocide of Jews during World War II, he said during a trip to Jerusalem in 2020. His grandfather, their brother, survived.
The false claim that Ukraine is run by fascists who have persecuted Russians and Russian speakers has little to do with Ukraine’s politics: It’s about Putin’s efforts to sell the incursion to a population at home, and in some corners of Ukraine, for whom the rhetoric of purging Nazis carries a deep resonance.
Calls for “denazification” are geared toward explaining the war to Russians, former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul said on MSNBC on Wednesday.
“There is a history of some Ukrainians fighting on the Nazi side … but a very small group,” McFaul said shortly after Putin authorized the attack. Putin “is pulling on that thread from history to say that what you had was a neo-Nazi usurpation of power [in Ukraine] in 2014.”
In Putin’s version of history, the West has overlooked the Soviet role in the Second World War, while the country continues to mourn the astronomical losses at the hands of Nazis. Putin has sought to portray his actions as the continuation of that fight to galvanize public support.
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