Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, speaks mainly for internal public consumption. So when he addressed the nation on TV on the eve of his attack on Ukraine stating the goal of “denazification” of that country, he was appealing to the quasi-Pavlovian reflex developed by many Russians of supporting their government against foreign enemies as soon as they hear the term “Nazi”.
But in trying to mobilize the Russian people behind the invasion, Putin has scored a propaganda own goal. First, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky replied “How can I be a Nazi?” and while not mentioning explicitly his Jewishness he reminded Putin that his own grandfather had fought the Nazi invaders as a Red Army officer and died with the rank of colonel after Ukraine’s independence in 1991, but also had several of his relatives massacred by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Then Putin followed his denazification canard with a blunder when his air force bombed the TV tower in Kiev, which stands in the vicinity of the Babyn Yar memorial complex for the 100,000 victims – Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Roma and others executed in a ravine there by the Nazis in 1941 – 1942.
Apart from the fact that it killed five and injured five others, the attack raised international anger among prominent Jews.
“It is symbolic that [Russian President Vladimir Putin] starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the Babyn Yar, the biggest Nazi massacre,” said the chair of Babyn Yar’s advisory board, former Jewish prisoner of conscience and Israeli MP, Natan Sharansky.
Sharansky said the Russian leader had sought “to distort and manipulate the Holocaust to justify an illegal invasion of a sovereign democratic country” in the “utterly abhorrent” move.
To further discredit Putin’s claim, Dani Dayan, director of Yad Vashem – The Israeli Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem – accused the Russian President of “trivializing” the Holocaust, while the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg Tribunal where Nazi war criminals were tried, soon to be 102-year-old Bejamin Ferencz said Putin should be behind bars for war crimes.
So what was Putin talking about when he made his “denazification” claim, who are the Nazis in Ukraine? He specifically referred to a genocide against Russians in the East of Ukraine. More generally, politicians and nationalists in Russia maintain that the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich was toppled in 2014 by mass demonstrations inspired by the West and with heavy involvement for the Ukrainian far-Right.
And indeed after Petro Poroshenko’s election as President the neo-Nazi Azov movement, with a political and a military wing and the far-Right Pravy Sektor (The Right Sector) were tolerated in the name of unity by the new government. The far-Right in Ukraine have also celebrated time and again ultranationalists and antisemites from the past, like Symon Petliura and Stepan Bandera or even members of the SS Galizien division made up of Ukrainian volunteers.
But since 2019, when Zelensky became the first Jewish President elected by public vote in Europe in a landslide the far-Right have been marginalised and they have failed to win a single seat in the Supreme Rada, Ukraine unicameral parliament and are restricted to two seats in the regional assemblies.
What makes Putin’s denazification claim even more dubious is his support, sometimes financial, for far-Right parties in Western Europe, like the National Rally in France. So really Putin’s “denazification” claim is just a canard, mainly for domestic purpose.
The second canard used by Putin, this time for international consumption, is that NATO and EU countries like Poland or Romania have been deprived of territories by Ukraine in the past. This claim is disingenuous, to say the least. First, it was the Soviet Union, not Ukraine, who deprived these countries of territories, following secret protocols in the Stalin – Hitler (the Nazi leader, remember?) Pact of 1939, known also as the Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact.
Secondly, Putin fails to mention Belarus, his ally which allowed its territory to be used for the invasion of Ukraine, who has also benefited from Stalin’s largesse to the detriment of Poland.
Thirdly, other countries which appeared after 1990, like Slovakia or Moldova, have also lost territories to Ukraine in the past, also courtesy to Stalin. So, to put the blame on today’s Ukraine for these territorial losses is profoundly dishonest from the leader of a country which has inherited the bulk of the USSR territory, who has already annexed Crimea, has de facto control over breakaway regions in former Soviet republics like Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia and who, more importantly, is eyeing the annexation of territories of the internationally recognised state of Ukraine.
To their credit, neither Poland nor Romania have fallen into Putin’s trap and have kept a strong solidarity with Ukraine, including their reception of a massive wave of refugees.
There have been revisionist opinions aired on Romanian Facebook, some of them inspired by Russian trolling, saying that this is not the moment to support Ukraine, `the country which stole our land in 1940 and again in 1944`, and `is bad at respecting the rights of our minority over there`.
Romania and Ukraine signed and ratified a treaty in 1997, recognising the border between them established by the Paris treaty in 1947. Many in Romania have been grumbling about that treaty, signed under Western pressure for eventual admission to NATO and EU, they say, when Ukraine doesn’t keep her side of the bargain when it comes to the rights of the Romanian minority there.
Now is not the time for revisionism, nor will it ever be. Ukraine is a country whose survival is essential for the whole of Europe. This is not 1939, it is 2022 and Putin represents the spirit of the former years. He is a reminder of the evils of Nazism and Communism colluding to redraw borders to their advantage and if there is a country which would need, not necessarily denazification, but democratization, that is without the shadow of a doubt Putin’s Russia. Hopefully, Putin’s canards will fool only an insignificant minority and only for some of the time.
