"Vladimir Putin's false war claims
Shortly before launching a full-scale war on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin outlined his reasons for the attack. Russia, he said, must "defend itself" and "denazify" Ukraine.
Much of this is false.
Putin's statement is a propaganda narrative that lacks any basis.
Putin uses the term denazification, which refers to the Allies' policy for Nazi Germany after World War II. They wanted to rid the country of Nazi influences and remove incriminated individuals from their posts.
However, the comparison with Ukraine is wrong, Andreas Umland, an analyst at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS), told DW:
"This talk of Nazism in Ukraine is completely out of place," he said.
"The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a Russian-speaking Jew who won the last presidential election by a huge margin against a non-Jewish Ukrainian candidate."
While there are far-right groups in Ukraine, Umland said, they are relatively weak compared to those in many European countries.
"We had a united front of all radical right-wing parties in the last parliamentary elections in 2019 where they won 2.15% of the vote."
Ulrich Schmid, professor for Russian culture and society at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, describes Putin's claim as "a perfidious insinuation."
It is true that there were individual far-right groups during the Euromaidan protests in 2013 and 2014. Today, however, they play a subordinate role, said Schmid, who researches nationalism in Eastern Europe.
"They exist, but in Russia itself there are at least as many far-right groups as in Ukraine."
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