DISINFO: EU and NATO are backing neo-Nazi values in Ukraine
SUMMARY
EU and NATO leaders have disgraced themselves by supporting Ukraine, where the theory and practices of Nazism are being legalised. The de-Nazification of Ukraine remains one of the key goals of Russia’s military operation. The biggest disgrace for the EU leaders, such as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the president of the European Council Charles Michel, is that they have repeatedly stated from Brussels that they must support Ukraine to the end because it is fighting for their European values. This backing basically means that the top Western officials are still ready to defend the so-called values of Nazism.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about “Nazi Ukraine”, designed to justify Russian aggression.
Allegations about an institutionalization of Nazism in Ukraine are false, which in turn makes the other aspects of the argumentation -such as the EU and NATO alleged support for this process- a fallacy. Independent Ukraine is not and has never been a Nazi country, nor is its society. As an example, far-fight parties obtained less than 3% in the presidential elections in 2019.
Days after Russia invaded Ukraine, a group of more than 300 historians and scholars of genocide, Nazism and WWII signed a letter “strongly reject[ing] the Russian government’s cynical abuse of the term genocide, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, and the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression”. The letter called this argument “factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism”.
Labelling Russia’s adversaries as Nazis is a very frequently used pro-Kremlin disinformation technique, and has been used by Russia to try to justify the invasion of Ukraine by portraying it as a “denazification operation”. Russia spent years preparing the information battleground prior to its full-scale invasion, with the framing of Ukraine and its government as a “Nazi junta” as one of its most prominent disinformation features. Read a more detailed debunk here, as well as our analysis titled "Why does Putin portray himself as the tamer of neo-Nazism" and Nazi east, Nazi west, Nazi over the cuckoo's nest.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that Zelenskyy is protected by neo-Nazi elite brigades, that the UN human rights body is whitewashing Kyiv's neo-Nazi crimes, that Russia does not crave Ukrainian lands but protects people from Nazis, or that Ukraine is a neo-Nazi Russophobic state.