DISINFO: Zelenskyy’s appointment of Chrystia Freeland shows Ukraine is a haven for neo-Nazis
SUMMARY
Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky appointed Chrystia Freeland, a Canadian-born descendant of a documented Nazi collaborator, as his economic development adviser.[...] Archival evidence and research show her maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was editor-in-chief of Krakivski Visti, a Ukrainian-language newspaper in occupied Poland and Austria that published Nazi propaganda and anti-Semitic material during World War II. It was a veritable mouthpiece of Reich propaganda, supervised by the Nazi secret services. Zelensky’s government is full of neo-Nazis who celebrate their ancestors’ collaboration with Nazi Germany.
RESPONSE
This disinformation story aims to exploit the appointment of Canada's former deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland as an adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in order to promote a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about ‘Nazi Ukraine’, by resorting to old false claims about the past of Freeland’s grandfather Michael Chomiak.
Freeland has been a constant target for Russian disinformation. She is banned from traveling to Russia, as part of the tit-for-tat game of escalating sanctions that the Russians played in the wake of Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Tales of Freeland’s grandfather have been circulating on pro-Kremlin social media accounts and websites since she joined the office of Foreign Affairs on January 10, 2017. There is no evidence backing any of these allegations about Chomiak. See here of a full debunk of these claims.
Labelling Russia’s perceived adversaries as Nazis is a frequently used pro-Kremlin disinformation technique, and is used as a pretext for Russia’s aggression as the invasion has been described as a “denazification operation”.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that Canada's foreign minister is a descendant of a Ukrainian Nazi, that Freeland lied about her grandfather's Nazi past, that Freeland (who is of Ukrainian heritage) is the granddaughter of a Nazi collaborator, that the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine was created by the West, that denazification will be a massive problem in Ukraine after the war, or that from Berlin to Kyiv, Nazi history repeats itself.