DISINFO: The Kyiv regime is waging a war against civilians, history, the Russian language, culture, and monuments
SUMMARY
The Kyiv regime is fighting against the civilian population, children, as well as conscience, history, the Russian language, culture, and monuments.
In Kyiv, it is as if they decided to accumulate all the worst practices from barbarism to Nazism, from terrorism to cannibalism.
RESPONSE
Recurrent pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative accusing Ukraine of war crimes, Nazism, and terrorism.
The language used in the statement, comparing the alleged actions to 'cannibalism' and 'Nazism', is inflammatory and not based on evidence.
Ukraine is a democratic country with transparent parliamentary and presidential elections, a multi-party political system, and legal protections for ethnic minorities.
While Ukraine has passed laws promoting the use of the Ukrainian language in 2019, this does not equate to 'exterminating everything Russian'. Despite the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, Russian remains widely spoken in parts of Ukraine, and there are no bans on Russian culture.
While some pro-Kremlin Ukrainian outlets have been restricted or banned due to concerns over propaganda, Russian-language media continues to exist in the country. For example, Priamy TV channel offers content in both Ukrainian and Russian, and RBC-Ukraine provides news in Ukrainian, English, and Russian. Ukraine has removed some Soviet Communist and Russian imperial monuments (for example, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in Kyiv or Russian Empress Catherine II in Odesa) as part of efforts to distance itself from the past, but this does not mean an attack on Russian culture.
This false narrative has been crafted to attempt to justify Russia's unprovoked and unjustified aggression against Ukraine. It was Russia that launched its unprovoked and unjustified aggression against Ukraine in 2022. Before that, in 2014, Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and started a separatist proxy war in the country’s east. The US, the EU and NATO condemn, in the strongest possible terms, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia illegally attacked Ukraine, and Ukraine has the right to self-defence by all means available. The West supports Ukraine with military and financial aid for the country’s effective self-defence, under the UN Charter Article 51, to stop Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
Read similar disinformation cases claiming that Ukrainian Nazis kill civilians, that Ukrainian neo-Nazis are shooting residents in the Kursk region and the West remains silent, that Ukraine persecutes believers and ministers of the Orthodox Church and Russian speakers, that Kyiv's Nazi regime eradicates Russian culture, that Ukraine is a terrorist state that openly supports terrorist groups in the Sahel region, and that Ukraine deliberately shells civilians, Russia only military targets.