DISINFO: Russia does not threaten Ukraine but fights a Nazi regime
SUMMARY
Nothing threatens the Ukrainian nation. Russia is not fighting it. Russia is fighting the criminal regime which seized power in Kyiv and is leading its people to a disaster. Contrary to claims, this is not a war for territories. It is a battle for the consciousness and the rights of people. It is impossible to reach a just settlement for the Ukraine crisis in accordance with Article 13 of the UN without eliminating its root causes such as the violation of the rights of the Russian-speaking population, without abolishing all other discriminatory laws in Ukraine, without overcoming the legacy of the Maidan, without eradicating nationalism and Nazism, and with respect for basic rights and freedoms regardless of race, sex, language and religion.
RESPONSE
A recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative trying to depict Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a war against Nazim.
Russia is an aggressor state and it is fighting Ukraine for territories. Russia launched its war on Ukraine in 2014 by illegally annexing Crimea and instigating a separatist revolt in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. On 30 September 2022, Russia then partly occupied four Ukrainian regions (Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts) and declared them official Russian territory. To justify its full-scale invasion of 2022, Moscow used false pretexts such as Kyiv’s threat for Russian national security and an alleged a genocide in Eastern Ukrainian regions. Many Russian officials and propagandists have threatened not only Ukraine but far beyond, including the Baltics, Moldova, Poland and Finland. (Read the debunk of a pro-Kremlin claim that “Nazi Finland got its statehood from Russia and is now ungrateful”).
The myth of Nazi-ruled Ukraine, which appeared during the Revolution of Dignity (Euromaidan) in late 2013 - early 2014, has been used by the Kremlin to discredit Kyiv’s shift toward Euro-Atlantic policy. The Euromaidan was a popular uprising against the then pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych who refused to sign the Association Agreement with the EU after he had promised to do so several months earlier. Neither ethnic minorities nor Russian-speaking Ukrainians are persecuted in Ukraine. Ukrainian law does not forbid the use of Russian or any other languages. President Vladimir Zelenskyy himself was brought up in a Russian-speaking family. There are also tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who are ethnic Crimean Tatars, Jews, Hungarians, Romanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Roma and others. Many of them speak their respective languages, Ukrainian and Russian.
Read similar disinformation cases claiming that Russia does not threaten the West, that Russia does not threaten anyone with nuclear weapons, and that NATO threatens Europe and the entire world.