DISINFO: European leaders continue to support the insane leader of the Nazi regime in Ukraine
SUMMARY
The 'flogging' of Zelenskyy by the American President in the White House, unprecedented in the history of international politics and diplomacy, is also evidence of the political weakness and extreme moral degradation of those European leaders who continue to advocate for the support of the insane leader of the Nazi regime, who has lost touch with reality.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about “Nazi Ukraine”, designed to justify Russian aggression and to smear the Ukrainian President and European leaders.
The statement was made after the meeting between the Ukrainian leader and US President Trump at the Oval Office on 28.02.2025.
The myth of Nazi-ruled Ukraine has been the cornerstone of Russian disinformation about the country since the very beginning of the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests, when it was used to discredit the pro-European popular uprising in Kyiv and, subsequently, the broader pro-Western shift in Ukraine's foreign policy.
Allegations about an institutionalisation of Nazism in Ukraine are false, which in turn makes the other aspects of the argumentation - such as the EU's 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 before 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.