Status: 02/22/2023 10:35 a.m
Russia justifies the invasion of Ukraine as an act of self-defense against Nazis in Ukraine and fascists in the West. This propaganda has a long tradition.
According to the Kremlin’s narrative, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is an act of self-defense, and the Ukrainian government in Kiev is nothing more than a Nazi regime. Russian propaganda never tires of spreading that Ukrainian fascists are threatening the life and limb of people of Russian origin.
Like Russian President Vladimir Putin, when he claimed at a meeting with representatives of the domestic aviation industry that after the fall of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, Ukrainian nationalists had started a war against Russia: “The war started then. He lasted eight years with the aim of annihilating the people associated with Russian culture, with the Russian language.”
Euromaidan crucial to Kremlin narrative
According to Elisaveta Gaufmann, professor of Russian discourse and politics at the University of Groningen, the Euromaidan in Kiev, which resulted in the ousting of the pro-Russian government of Yanukovych, plays a decisive role in the Kremlin’s narrative that Kiev is taking over Nazi regime.
According to Gaufmann, Russian propaganda used the fact that nationalists, along with many democratic forces, were also involved in the pro-European protest movement for its own purposes: “If you watched Russian television back then, you got the impression that only the right-wing sector on the Euromaidan participated.” Since, according to Russian television, the right-wing sector was the only force behind the Maidan, it was of course easier to portray the whole movement as Nazi or fascist.
Every enemy is declared a Nazi
The Kremlin used the argument that it had to protect itself from Nazi hordes when it annexed Crimea and fomented violent unrest in eastern Ukraine. The fact that this propaganda was able to catch on at all has much deeper roots, according to Eastern Europe historian Veronika Wendland from the Herder Institute in Marburg:
You have to know that as early as Stalinism, the term Nazi or fascist was applied to everyone who was declared an enemy.
The European Union as the “Fourth Reich”
The veneration of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, which is particularly widespread in western Ukraine, also plays into the hands of Russian propaganda. In the meantime, however, those who supported Ukraine were also declared Nazis. Even during the Euromaidan, the European Union was sometimes defamed as the “Fourth Reich” on Russian state television, according to Gaufmann: “Now it has become even more popular to say that in 1941 not only the Nazis, but all of Europe was against the Soviet Union.”
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently went so far as to accuse EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen of racism. “Ursula von der Leyen declared that the end of the war should be a Russian defeat of a kind that the Russian economy should not recover from for many decades. Isn’t that racism, not Nazism? Not an attempt at a final solution to the Russian question? “
Putin draws a comparison to World War II
On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Red Army’s victory in the Battle of Stalingrad, Putin drew a direct comparison to the war in Ukraine and referred to the German government’s decision to deliver “Leopard 2” tanks to Ukraine: “We are being threatened again with German tanks – “Leopard” tanks, the sides of which are marked with crosses. And they want to fight Russia again on Ukrainian soil – at the hands of Hitler’s successors, the Bandera supporters.”
The distortion of historical facts in order to justify one’s own actions is now part of everyday life in Russia, according to Eastern Europe historian Wendland. But the increasingly shrill propaganda is also a sign of increasing helplessness and is reaching its limits: “It’s not really going down well with the Russian citizens. You don’t notice the spirit of people’s war against the enemy, like there was in World War II.”
The war needs the support of the population
This is one of the reasons why Russian propaganda has changed. Now paint the picture of a Ukraine that would be abused by the West, especially NATO, to wage war there against Russia, as the Secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, put it only recently:
In the 21st century, the collective West is waging a campaign against Russia using the puppet regime in Kiev.
Nevertheless, Wendland said that it would be simplistic to claim that the Russian war of aggression in the Ukraine was only a Kremlin war. Because Putin is dependent on the support of the population: “Without basic support from the population, even this elite cannot wage the war the way it wants to wage it.”
Kremlin propaganda about fight against fascists in Ukraine
Stephan Laack, WDR, 2/22/2023 8:34 a.m