What is the purpose of the story of Ukraine as a Nazi state?

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian propaganda has sought to portray the country as responsible for the war and war crimes, and even to declare it “Nazi”.

At the end of March 2022, the Russian army withdrew from the Ukrainian town of Bucha. When the Ukrainian army entered the town on 3 April, the bodies of dozens of victims of the Russian occupation were found. Shocking photographs of the murdered people lying in the streets with their hands tied soon circulated around the world.

The city had been under the control of Russian forces for just over a month, and Ukrainian officials said in August 2022, after months of investigation, that the remains of at least 458 victims had been found in Bucha, most of them civilians, including women and children.

Russian officials denied responsibility for the massacre, resorting to contradictory claims that the crimes were staged or that the Ukrainian army was responsible. Russian state media inside and outside the Russian Federation and sources close to them, including those in our region, continue to deny Russian responsibility for the crimes in Bucha.

Sputnik Serbia reported that the Bucha footage was faked and the crimes “staged”, and that the BBC footage showed “victims being revived” and “getting up and moving their arms”. Others uncritically passed on unsubstantiated claims by Russian officials that Ukraine was responsible for the killings of civilians in Bucha. False claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered the killings of civilians, i.e. that he “participated in a deal with the Nazis to kill people like in Bucha”, also circulated on social networks.

In this analysis, we provide an overview of the propaganda narratives that have sought to shift responsibility for the crimes of aggression against Ukraine onto Ukraine and to construct an image of Ukraine as a criminal and Nazi state – or even a “fake state” – that never had a right to exist.

Russia “liberates Ukraine”

From the beginning, Russian war propaganda deliberately ignored the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a Jew and portrayed him as the leader of the “neo-Nazi regime in Kiev”. This concept was already emphasised by Vladimir Putin in his declaration of war.

In a speech on 24 February, the day the invasion began, Putin set the framework for Russian propaganda narratives, including that of ‘Nazism’. He described the invasion as a “special military operation” aimed at the “de-Nazification and demilitarisation of Ukraine”, but also stated that he had decided to invade Ukraine in order to “protect the people (Ukrainian Russians op.a.) who are being subjected to the abuse and genocide that the Kiev regime has been carrying out for eight years”. Putin even called on the Ukrainian army to lay down its arms and stand by the Russian de facto invaders against the ‘junta that is plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people’ and the ‘neo-Nazis who have taken power in Ukraine’. This part of his speech was highlighted on the website of the Russian Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In the months that followed, the motif of Ukraine as a “Nazi state”, which featured prominently in Putin’s speech, became one of the central themes of the propaganda narratives of the official representatives of the Russian Federation in BiH and the region, supported by the pro-Russian media.

Thus, at the beginning of March 2022, Glas Srpske published an original text by the Russian ambassador to BiH, Igor Kalabuhov, who repeated the key claims of Putin’s speech. Kalabuhov described the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “special military operation for the demilitarisation and denationalisation of Ukraine” and said that Russia was not a threat to civilians in Ukraine, but to the authorities in Kiev and to “armed gangs who shoot at ordinary citizens without warning”, terrorising their fellow citizens.

Similar claims have already been spread on social networks by obscure “influencers”, who have assured their followers that the danger comes not from the destructive actions of the Russian army, but from “criminals armed by Zelensky”. The portrayal of Russia as the liberator of Ukraine was a common motif in early propaganda appearances and content, including claims that the Russian army was conducting a counter-offensive in Ukraine, while the Ukrainian army was throwing up its arms en masse and defecting to the side of the occupier. This narrative, present in the first days of the invasion, when it was still thought that Ukraine would be quickly conquered, has only been dismantled by time.

How did the story of Nazism spread in Ukraine?

By November 2022, Raskrinkavanje had evaluated 225 publications and media articles that made claims about Nazism and the commission or fabrication of crimes by Ukraine. Such claims were mostly spread on social media, i.e. on Twitter and Facebook profiles. As regards media content, most of the media outlets that published such content are in Serbia, including Sputnik, Novosti, Srbija Danas, Informer, Krstarica, Alo and Tanjug. In BiH, such claims could be found on the pages of Glas Srpske, RTRS and the Prijedor24h portal. The majority of the publications, 164, contained completely false claims, i.e. fake news, while the rest contained various manipulations and conspiracy theories.

The thesis that Ukraine is a Western-backed Nazi state was most often “proved” by the dissemination of disinformation that sought to create the impression that Nazi symbols are omnipresent in Ukraine’s political and social life. Such was the photomontage of the swastika on the T-shirt of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a series of bizarre claims that there were Ukrainian refugees (in the UK and Croatia), captured Ukrainian soldiers or, on the other side, wives of Ukrainian soldiers, Ukrainian fans at the World Cup football tournament held in Qatar and even contestants in the Eurovision Song Contest, have openly and openly worn Nazi symbols or used the Nazi salute.

False claims that a Ukrainian missile had hit the Kramatorsk railway station also circulated around the world. Comments were made that this would “give Zelensky his own private Nuremberg”, alluding to the Nuremberg Trials – the trial of former Nazi leaders for crimes committed during the Second World War.

Within this narrative are the false claims that the US has long armed and supported the Nazis in Ukraine, or that sanctions against Russia were imposed by the “former strike forces of the Third Reich”, which still nurture Nazi ideology. In some cases, it has even been claimed that Russia invaded Ukraine in order to prevent a third world war planned by NATO.

Russia’s equation of today’s Ukraine with Nazi Germany has met with particular condemnation from individuals and groups working to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and to study genocide, Nazism and the Second World War. In a joint statement, more than 140 scholars working in these fields condemned Putin’s words that the Russian authorities are abusing history and trying to portray Ukraine as a Nazi and fascist country in order to justify aggression against it.

In addition, this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day was marked for the first time without the presence of a Russian delegation at the former Auschwitz concentration camp, which was liberated by the Soviet army. According to the Director of the Auschwitz Museum, this is the first time that Russian representatives have not been invited to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of a death camp because Russia, by destroying Mariupol and Donetsk, has shown “the same sick megalomania” that the Nazis had when they built Auschwitz. Russian propaganda, on the other hand, does not give up the narrative that Russia is ‘fighting Nazism’ in Ukraine – what is more, this narrative is becoming increasingly radicalised. Just one day after the anniversary of Auschwitz, Sputnik Serbia reported on a statement by a Crimean deputy in the Russian Duma, who said that military aid from Western countries to Ukraine was the realisation of a ‘Nazi programme of genocide against the Slavic people. ”

Where does this narrative come from and what is its purpose?

The history of Ukrainian-Russian relations is long and complex. Ukraine first gained independence from Russia in 1917, but lost it again in 1922 when it was incorporated into the Soviet Union (USSR). The USSR carried out an intensive campaign of “Russification” in Ukraine, while one of the most difficult consequences of Soviet policy in Ukraine was the was the so-called The Great Famine (1932–1933), also known as the Holodomor (Famine)”. The Great Famine (1932-1933), also known as the Holodomor (famine), which claimed millions of Ukrainian lives and was recently recognised as genocide in a European Parliament resolution. The Holodomor was caused by Stalin’s decisions to collectivise agricultural production and then to literally deprive Ukrainian peasants of food and the ability to produce or obtain it.

When the German invasion of the Soviet Union began in June 1941, some Ukrainians saw this as an opportunity to leave the USSR. Mass killings of Jews began in 1941 and continued until 1944, famine reigned, more than 2.2 million Ukrainians were taken to Germany for forced labour, and a resistance movement against the Nazis, including secret communist cells, began to organise. Party in eastern and central Ukraine and the Soviet partisan movement in the north. On the other hand, in 1942, nationalist units began to form, which became known as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), fighting both the Germans and the Soviet partisans.

According to Đuro Vidmarović, a historian and former Croatian ambassador to Ukraine, Ukraine was mostly part of the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent Poland during the Second World War, and did not have its own “Nazi state”, although a few independence fighters temporarily sided with the Nazis during the German occupation. It soon became clear that Nazi Germany had no intention of “liberating” Ukraine or of supporting its collaborators there. They certainly were – the most famous is probably the nationalist Stepan Bandera, leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, who collaborated with the Nazis at the beginning of the war and was soon arrested by them for trying to establish an independent Ukraine. Bandera is one of the figures who is used extensively to portray Ukraine as a Nazi state. In Ukraine, he is still condemned as a Nazi collaborator by some circles and celebrated as a fighter for independence by others – for example, in 2010, he was posthumously awarded the title of ‘Hero of Ukraine’ by the then President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko – a move that provoked a storm of reactions both inside and outside the country.

Ukraine’s history during the Second World War is therefore complex – and in this respect it is not too different from most countries under Nazi occupation, where Quisling and resistance movements also developed. However, there was no Nazi ‘puppet state’ in Ukraine, just as the presence of radical right-wing groups today – which is by no means specific to Ukraine – does not represent the political ‘mainstream’ in that country.

The main argument in this narrative is the activity and status of the Ukrainian far-right military unit Azov, whose members are also linked to war crimes. In the narrative of Ukraine as a ‘Nazi state’, the actions of Azov are presented as an expression of the official policy of the Ukrainian authorities, ignoring the fact that the Russian annexation of Crimea and the war that has been waged in the eastern parts of the country since 2014 have contributed to the militarisation of part of Ukrainian society. At that time, Azov was created as a volunteer unit to take part in the fighting in these territories, and since then it has been part of the National Guard of Ukraine.

But we simply cannot talk about Nazism or fascism as the “official” ideology of the Ukrainian state. The far right in Ukraine, as in most European countries, has no significant influence in parliament and government. In the 2019 Ukrainian elections, the radical right political coalition won only 2% of the vote, which shows that this ideology does not have broad support among the electorate. There has never been the ‘neo-Nazi takeover’ in Ukraine that Vladimir Putin spoke of. What is more, surveys show that anti-Semitism is much less widespread in Ukraine than in Russia.

Jeffrey Veidlinger, a professor of history and Jewish studies at the American University of Michigan, said in an interview with the New York Times that the Russian understanding of Nazism is much more characterised by the idea of Nazi Germany as the antithesis of the Soviet Union than by the fact that Nazi ideology was based on the persecution of Jews.

“So it is possible for them to call a country with a Jewish president Nazi and not find it too illogical,” he believes.

The stories of the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine are therefore an ingenious way of gaining Russian public support for an attack on Ukraine because, as Veidlinger notes, they are rooted in a part of Russian history that is very important for the country: ‘The war against Nazism is really the defining moment of the 20th century for Russia. What they are doing now is, in a way, a continuation of that great moment of national unity from the Second World War”.

The historian Oleksa Drachewych also points out that the story of the “denazification” of Ukraine is consciously based on “Russian fascination with the Second World War”, i.e. on the USSR’s victory over Nazism as one of the greatest victories in Russian history.

Đuro Vidmarović also believes that the story of Ukrainian “Nazism” was primarily aimed at securing Russian public support for the attack on Ukraine: “The troop movements were preceded by an intensive propaganda offensive, aimed primarily at the domestic public. All the claims against the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian state were aimed at justifying the occupation of this country and exterminating those Ukrainians who would not accept the occupation. One of the points of Russian anti-Ukrainian propaganda was the claim that Ukrainians are Nazis and Ukraine is a Nazi state, which would give the Russian Federation the right to intervene and carry out ‘denazification’ in Ukraine.

Data compiled by the analytical firm Semantic Visions and presented in a New York Times article show that the association of Ukraine with Nazism in the Russian public sphere has increased significantly since the invasion. The research involved a huge sample of almost eight million articles about Ukraine published in Russian, with some 8000 websites from Russia. The term Nazism appeared in fewer than 250 articles a week in these sources until 24 February last year, and in more than 2000 articles on the day the invasion of Ukraine began. Since then, the frequency of use of the term in relation to Ukraine has remained significantly higher than ever, although stories of “Ukrainian Nazism” have been around since 2014, when they were used to justify support for separatist “republics” and the annexation of Crimea.

Ukraine as a “criminal” and a country that does not exist

The use of propaganda to discredit an opponent in warfare is part of so-called hybrid or special warfare. Accusing the other side of its own crimes is a classic means of war propaganda, and narratives that seek to portray the attacked side as criminal are not unique to the war in Ukraine. In the digital age, with the emergence of online media and, above all, social networks, the marketing and dissemination of such content is faster than ever.

Accusations against Ukraine often include false claims that the Ukrainian army is responsible for violations by Russian forces. In addition to the aforementioned attempt to blame Ukraine for the crimes in Bucha, inaccurate claims have also been spread in these areas that the Ukrainian army has mined the city of Mariupol and held civilians hostage there, refusing to allow them to leave the city, and even that the Ukrainian army ‘dresses up in Russian uniforms and kills civilians’. In addition to the allegations of the commission of crimes, within this narrative there are also allegations of other types of actions by the Ukrainian authorities against their own citizens, such as those that ordered the shutdown of the mobile network in the Kherson region.

In his speech on 24 February, Putin denied that Ukraine had ever had a “real statehood”, presenting it as a temporary formation and even a kind of “occupation” government terrorising its own people. This motive was not without support from local conspiracy theorists and pro-Russian media in the region. For example, there were claims that Ukraine had never applied for border registration and was therefore formally not a state but a province, as well as the bizarre story that it had handed over its gold and foreign currency reserves to Poland, thus “losing another component of statehood”.

In addition to accusations of acting against its own people, the Ukrainian army has been accused on several occasions of attacking foreign citizens or missions of international organisations in the country. Fake news that Ukrainian forces had seized Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) vehicles or that they had seized the UN office in Kramatorsk was quickly denied by both organisations.

If Ukraine did not accuse the Kremlin of war crimes of its own making, Russia largely denied them and attributed them to ‘Western propaganda’. In September 2022, a few days after the discovery of the mass grave in Izjum, conspiracy theorists started sharing a video of an environmental protest in Vienna, falsely claiming that it was being portrayed by “Western propaganda” as a report on mass graves (the same video had previously been used as evidence of the “faking of the pandemic” Covid-19, with equally inaccurate claims that it was being portrayed by the Western media as a report on the victims of the pandemic).

In a series of similar disinformation, Western media have been wrongly accused of falsifying or fabricating evidence of crimes in Ukraine, presenting film scenes or old accident footage as scenes from the war in Ukraine. None of this happened.

Since the start of the war, the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) has been monitoring the disinformation about the Ukrainian war spread in the European Union, using data from fact-checking newsrooms operating in the EU. The periodic reports published by EDMO show that the campaign to discredit Ukraine is the most prominent (44% of the monitored narratives, including accusations of Nazism and falsification of crimes), followed by narratives targeting NATO and foreign countries supporting Ukraine (15%), the personality of Volodymyr Zelenskiy (12%), the Western media (12%) and Ukrainian refugees (7%).

The narratives, in which various unfounded accusations are made against Ukraine and Ukrainians, are still relevant today, one year after the invasion began. Sputnik Serbia, the Serbian edition of the Russian state media, has played an important role in the creation and dissemination of media content tailored to Russian policy in our linguistic space. Disinformative and manipulative reports on the war in Ukraine were transmitted from this portal by numerous pro-Russian media outlets in Serbia and Republika Srpska – including public services and news agencies. They have also appeared in media outlets that are ideologically not close to Sputnik, thanks to the trend of so-called copy/paste journalism, the routine transmission of media content without any verification, with the sole motive of maximising page views as much as possible. Social networks have also played an important role in spreading the Russian narrative against Ukraine, where some, especially “successful” disinformation has managed to reach thousands of interactions./raskrinkavanje.ba/