DISINFO: The Ukrainian regime kills the opposition with the help of neo-Nazis
SUMMARY
After the 2014 coup, the Ukrainian regime turned to outright terrorism against the opposition, including the killing of opposition politicians and journalists with the help of neo-Nazis, who were integrated into the structures of the security services and the Ministry of Interior.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative portraying Ukrainian politics and society as dominated by Nazi/ Fascist ideology; claiming that the Ukrainian regime kills opposition politicians and journalists is a wildly false claim that the article does not even attempt to corroborate.
The myth of Nazi-ruled Ukraine has been a 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. Far-right groups had a very limited presence during the protests and went on to obtain abysmal results in the 2014 presidential and parliamentary elections. During the 2019 election cycle, the far-right managed to sustain an even more tremendous failure.
There was no coup d’état in Kyiv in 2014; this is a longstanding pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Ukraine's Euromaidan. The spontaneous onset of the Euromaidan protests was a reaction by numerous segments of the Ukrainian population to former president Viktor Yanukovych’s sudden departure from the promised Association Agreement with the European Union in November 2013.
See similar disinformation cases alleging that neo-Nazis were the cornerstone for the power shift in Ukraine; the far-right coup government in Kyiv emerged from the 2014 Maidan uprising; Ukraine has established an apartheid regime in relation to Russian speakers.