Russian allegations of fascism against Ukraine

As part of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian state and state-controlled media have spread disinformation in their information war against Ukraine. Ukrainian media and politicians have also been accused of using propaganda and deception, although such efforts have been described as more limited than the Russian disinformation campaign.

Russian propaganda and fake news stories have attacked Ukraine's right to exist and accused it of being a neo-Nazi state, committing genocide against Russian speakers, developing nuclear and biological weapons, and being influenced by Satanism. Russian propaganda also accuses NATO of controlling Ukraine and building up military infrastructure in Ukraine to threaten Russia. Some of this disinformation has been spread by so-called Russian web brigades. Russian claims have been widely rejected as untrue and crafted to justify the invasion and even to justify genocidal acts against Ukrainians. The Russian state has denied carrying out war crimes in Ukraine, and Russian media has falsely blamed some of them on Ukrainian forces instead. Some of the disinformation seeks to undermine international support for Ukraine and to provoke hostility against Ukrainian refugees.

Russian disinformation has been pervasive and successful in Russia itself, due to censorship of war news and state control of most media. Because of the amount of disinformation, Russian media has been restricted and its reputation has been tarnished in many Western and developed countries. Russia has been more successful spreading disinformation in the Global South, particularly in the Sahel region of Africa, where Russia uses private military companies to support local regimes (see Wagner Group activities in Africa).

Descriptions of Ukraine-sponsored propaganda and misinformation have focused on over-optimistic reports about the war and promotion of patriotic stories.

Russian themes

Disinformation (a lie or exaggeration meant to sway opinion) has been spread by the Russian state, state-controlled media, propagandists, and Russian web brigades as part of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Its purpose is to build support for Russia's invasion, and to weaken opposition to the war. It also seeks to sow disunity among Western countries who support Ukraine; to counter NATO; and to cover up or create plausible deniability for Russian war crimes.

Russian documents were obtained and filed in court by the FBI, which outline a Russian operation to manipulate influential people in Europe and to target people on social media with posts, comments and fake news. The goal being to sow division, undermine support for Ukraine, and discredit Ukraine's allies using psychological warfare. The documents identified Germany as particularly vulnerable to Russian influence.

The following are common themes in Russian propaganda and disinformation, along with some of the common rebuttals.

Denying Ukrainian nationhood and statehood

Russian propaganda has attacked Ukrainian nationhood and national identity, portraying Ukrainians as "Little Russians" or "part of an all-Russian nation". This has been a theme in Russian imperialist and nationalist rhetoric since the seventeenth century. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long questioned the Ukrainian people's identity and the country's legitimacy. In his 2021 essay " On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians", Putin called Russians and Ukrainians " one people" and claimed there is "no historical basis" for the "idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians".Düben, B A.
Revising History and ‘Gathering the Russian Lands’: Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian Nationhood"
'' LSE Public Policy Review'', vol. 3, no. 1, 2023 Since then, Russia's official and media narrative is that Ukraine has always been Russian. In announcing the invasion, Putin repeatedly denied Ukraine's right to exist, claiming that it was created by the Russian Bolsheviks and that it never had "real statehood". Björn Alexander Düben, professor of international affairs, writes that "Putin's historical claims do not hold up to serious academic scrutiny" and that he is "embracing a neo-imperialist account that exalts Russia's centuries-long repressive rule over Ukraine, while simultaneously presenting Russia as a victim of 'US imperialism'".

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia and former Russian president, has called Ukraine part of Russia. He wrote that "Ukraine is NOT a country, but artificially collected territories" and that Ukrainian "is NOT a language" but a "mongrel dialect" of Russian. He has said that Ukraine should not exist in any form and that Russia will continue to wage war against any independent Ukrainian state.

Such denial of nationhood is said to be part of a campaign of incitement to genocide by Russian authorities. United Nations special rapporteurs have condemned the Russian occupation authorities for attempting "to erase local krainianculture, history, and language" and to forcibly replace them with Russian language and culture.

After the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, Russian rhetoric portrayed Ukrainian governments as illegitimate, calling them the "Kyiv regime" or "junta". Putin said they were "led by a band of drug addicts and neo-Nazis", and claimed Ukraine is "under external control" by the West or the United States.

The official governmental website of Ukraine says that Ukrainians consider themselves an independent nation. A poll conducted in April 2022 by "Rating" found that the vast majority (91%) of Ukrainians (excluding the Russian-occupied territories) do not support the thesis that "Russians and Ukrainians are one people".

Allegations of Nazism

Putin falsely claimed that the Ukrainian government were neo-Nazis and announced that one of his goals was the "de-Nazification of Ukraine". Putin's claims were repeated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in a speech to the UN Human Rights Council; many diplomats walked out in protest. These claims were repeated in Russian media to justify the war. In April 2022, Russian state-owned news agency ''RIA Novosti'' published an article by Timofey Sergeytsev, " What Russia should do with Ukraine", where he argued that Ukraine and Ukrainian national identity must be wiped out, because he claimed most Ukrainians are at least "passive Nazis". By May, references to de-Nazifying Ukraine in Russian media began to wane, reportedly because it had not gained traction with the Russian public.

These allegations of Nazism are widely rejected as untrue and part of a Russian disinformation campaign to justify the invasion, with many pointing out that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and had relatives who were victims of the Holocaust. Some of the world's leading historians of Nazism and the Holocaust put out a statement rejecting Putin's claims, which was signed by hundreds of other historians and scholars of the subject. It says:

The authors say that Ukraine "has right-wing extremists and violent xenophobic groups" like any country, but "none of this justifies the Russian aggression and the gross mischaracterization of Ukraine". The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum denounced Putin's claims, saying "once again, innocent people are being killed purely because of insane pseudo-imperial megalomania". The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem condemned Putin's abuse of Holocaust history. Ukrainian Jews likewise rejected claims of Ukraine being a neo-Nazi state.

Kremlin claims of Nazism against Ukraine are partly an attempt to drum-up support for the war among its citizens. Russian propaganda has framed it as a continuation of the Soviet Union's "Great Patriotic War" against Nazi Germany, even though Russia supports far-right groups across Europe. In the words of Miriam Berger for ''The Washington Post'', "the rhetoric of the 'fight against fascism' resonates deeply in Russia, which suffered huge losses in the fight against Nazi Germany". Some Soviet imagery was used as part of this propaganda drive, and Ukrainian flags were replaced with Victory Banners in some occupied towns.

Experts on disinformation say that Russia's portrayal of Ukrainians as Nazis helps them justify Russian war crimes; Russia's UN representative justified the Hroza missile attack in this way. Historian Timothy Snyder said the Russian regime calls Ukrainians "Nazis" to justify genocidal acts against them. He said pro-war Russians use "Nazi" to mean "a Ukrainian who refuses to be Russian". Russian neo-fascist Aleksandr Dugin proposed to simply "identify Ukrainian Nazism with Russophobia". Dugin argued that Russia should be the only country allowed to define Ukrainian Nazism and Russophobia, in the same way that Jews have what he calls a "monopoly" on the definition of antisemitism.

Ukrainian officials respond that Russia's own actions in Ukraine are like those of Nazi Germany, and some commentators, including Snyder, have likened Putin's Russia to a fascist state (see Ruscism). Many Russian units who took part in the invasion are linked to neo-Nazism themselves, including the Rusich Group and Kremlin-sponsored Wagner Group.Šmíd, Tomáš & Šmídová, Alexandra. (2021)
Anti-government Non-state Armed Actors in the Conflict in Eastern Ukraine
''Czech Journal of International Relations'', Volume 56, Issue 2. pp.48-49. Other openly neo-Nazi groups have been involved in recruiting, training and fighting on the Russian side, such as the Russian Imperial Legion, AAST and Atomwaffen Division Russland. Russian far-right groups also played a major role among the Russian proxy forces in Donbas.

Like many countries, Ukraine has a far-right fringe, such as Right Sector and Svoboda. Analysts generally agree that the Russian government greatly exaggerates far-right influence in Ukraine, as there is no widespread support for far-right ideology in the government, military, or electorate. In the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election, a coalition of far-right parties including Right Sector received only 2% of votes and did not win any seats. Ukraine's Azov Brigade began as a far-right volunteer militia. It was a focus of Kremlin propaganda, which falsely claimed they were "anti-Russian neo-Nazis persecuting ethnic Russians". Azov has been mentioned on Russian TV more often than Putin's ruling United Russia party. By the time of the invasion, the brigade had been largely de-politicized. A 2022 Counter Extremism Project report concluded that the Azov Brigade can no longer be defined as neo-Nazi.

Donbas genocide allegations

In his announcement of the invasion, Putin baselessly claimed that Ukraine was carrying out genocide in the mainly Russian-speaking Donbas region. He said the purpose of Russia's "military operation" was to "protect the people" of the Russian-controlled breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin claimed they had been facing "genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime" for eight years. There is no evidence for Putin's claims of genocide, and they have been widely rejected as a pretext for invasion. The European Commission called the allegations "Russian disinformation". Over 300 scholars on genocide issued a statement rejecting Russia's abuse of the term "genocide" to "justify its own violence". Ukraine brought a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to challenge Russia's claim. The ICJ said it had not seen any evidence of genocide by Ukraine.

Altogether, about 14,300 people were killed in the Donbas War, both soldiers and civilians. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 6,500 were Russian proxy forces, 4,400 were Ukrainian forces, and 3,404 were civilians on both sides of the frontline. The vast majority of civilian deaths were in the first year, and the death rate in the Donbas War was actually falling before the 2022 Russian invasion: in 2019 there were 27 conflict-related civilian deaths, in 2020 there were 26 deaths, and in 2021 there were 25 deaths, over half of them from mines and unexploded ordnance. By comparison, after Russia's full-scale invasion, 4,163 civilians were killed in March 2022, meaning that more civilians died in that one month alone than in the entire eight years of the Donbas War. Since the invasion, Russian state-controlled media and pro-Kremlin Telegram channels falsely accused Ukrainian troops of attacking civilian targets in Mariupol and bombing Ukrainian cities. According to Russian website ''Bumaga'', an anonymous former employee of Yevgeny Prigozhin's media company "Patriot" said that most of their reports about "victims of Ukrainian Armed Forces" in Donbas were staged.

Allegations of NATO provocation and aggression

Russian propaganda often claims that NATO and its " eastward expansion" provoked the invasion and that Russia had to invade Ukraine in self-defense. In his two speeches just before the invasion, Putin said that Ukraine joining NATO would be a threat, and warned that NATO might use Ukraine to launch a surprise attack on Russia. He falsely claimed that NATO was building up its forces and military infrastructure in Ukraine, and that the Ukrainian military was under NATO control. Russian state media falsely claimed that thousands of NATO soldiers had been killed in the invasion.

Although it seeks to join, Ukraine is not a member of NATO; a collective security alliance of 32 member states, similar to the Russian-led CSTO. In 1999, Russia signed the Charter for European Security, affirming the right of each state to choose its security arrangements and join alliances if they wish.

Putin claimed that NATO broke a promise not to let any Eastern European countries join. This unwritten promise was allegedly made by American and German diplomats to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, but the diplomats and NATO denied ever making any formal proposal. Such a promise was never included in any treaty, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991. From then until the Russian invasion, 14 Eastern European countries willingly joined NATO. Political scientist Filip Kostelka says many of these countries sought NATO membership "to protect themselves from the Russian threat. They did not need to be pushed". The last time a country bordering Russia had joined NATO prior to the invasion was in 2004.

Putin has not always opposed NATO. According to Michael McFaul and Robert Person, this suggests Putin did not truly believe it to be a military threat. In 2002, Putin said Ukraine's relationship with NATO was not Russia's concern. Russia did not make threats about the Baltic states joining NATO in 2004. Putin said in 2005 that if Ukraine wanted to join NATO, "we will respect their choice, because it is their sovereign right to decide their own defence policy, and this will not worsen relations between our countries". It was not until his 2007 Munich speech that Putin openly opposed NATO enlargement. Nevertheless, Russia deepened co-operation with NATO in 2010, and the two continued to co-operate until Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

When Russia occupied Crimea and invaded the Donbas in 2014, Ukraine was officially a neutral country and was not seeking NATO membership. In December 2014, Ukraine's parliament voted to end this neutral status in response to Russia's aggression, and Ukraine only applied to join NATO in response to the 2022 invasion. Steven Pifer thus argues that Russia's own aggressive actions have done the most to push Ukraine towards NATO. When Russia invaded in 2022, Ukraine was a long way from membership. Members of the alliance have been wary of letting Ukraine join, partly due to Putin's warnings.

Russia's invasion led Finland to join NATO, doubling the length of Russia's border with NATO. Putin said that Finland's membership was not a threat, unlike Ukraine's, but warned against any military buildup in Finland.

Peter Dickinson of the Atlantic Council suggested the real reason Putin opposes NATO is not because he believes it is a threat, but because it "prevents him from bullying Russia's neighbors". Tom Casier writes that Russia's annexation of southeastern Ukraine reveals that the real motive for the invasion is to create a " Greater Russia".

Shortly before his death in a plane crash, Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin accused the Russian military leadership of lying about NATO aggression to justify the invasion. Prigozhin was a close ally of Putin and his Wagner Group played an important role in the invasion.

An article published by the Institute for the Study of War concluded:

"Putin didn't invade Ukraine in 2022 because he feared NATO. He invaded because he believed that NATO was weak, that his efforts to regain control of Ukraine by other means had failed, and that installing a pro-Russian government in Kyiv would be safe and easy. His aim was not to defend Russia against some non-existent threat but rather to expand Russia's power, eradicate Ukraine's statehood, and destroy NATO, goals he still pursues".

Proxy war claims

The Russian government accused NATO of waging a "proxy war" against Russia, because its members have sent military aid to Ukraine after the invasion.
Russian state media falsely claimed that some Ukrainian military units fighting the invasion were under NATO command. NATO says it is not at war with Russia, but supports Ukraine's "right to self-defense, as enshrined in the UN Charter". Lawrence Freedman wrote that calling Ukraine a NATO "proxy" wrongly implied that "Ukrainians are only fighting because NATO put them up to it, rather than because of the more obvious reason that they have been subjected to a vicious invasion". He said that any weakening of Russia caused by the war would result from "Moscow's folly ...not NATO's intent".
Geraint Hughes said that calling Ukraine NATO's "proxy" insults and belittles Ukrainians, denies their autonomy and implies they do not really have the will to defend their country.

Countering claims of NATO waging a proxy war, it is pointed out that NATO states have actually been slow in sending weaponry to Ukraine, especially advanced weapons, and they prevented Ukraine from firing those weapons into Russia. NATO refused to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and the US told Ukraine to stop attacking refineries and early-warning radars in Russia.

Start of the Russia-Ukraine war

Many people outside Ukraine, including politicians and commentators, regard 24 February 2022 as the start of Russia's war with Ukraine. According to political scientist Andreas Umland, this approach diminishes the significance of Russian armed overtake of Ukrainian Crimea and its covert intervention in the Ukrainian Donbas. Such approach helps Russian propaganda to justify its aggression. Umland and co-authors regard 20 February 2014 - the day Russia supposedly issued orders to prepare for the invasion, which is also engraved on the Russian Crimea campaign medal - as the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, while most researchers prefer 27 February, the day Russian forces occupied Crimean parliament.

Alleged assassination and sabotage attempts

On 18 February 2022, the Luhansk People's Republic showed a video purportedly showing removal of a car full of explosives prepared to blow up a train full of women and children evacuating to Russia. The video's metadata showed that it had been recorded on 12 June 2019.

The breakaway Donetsk People's Republic also released a video on 18 February 2022 that claimed to show Poles trying to blow up a chlorine tank. The video was further distributed by Russian media. The video's metadata showed that it was created on 8 February 2022, and included different pieces of audio or video, including a 2010 YouTube video from a military firing range in Finland. Ukrainian intelligence attributed responsibility for the video to the Russian intelligence service GRU.

According to Bellingcat, a supposed bombing of a "separatist police chief" by a "Ukrainian spy", broadcast on Russian state television, showed visual evidence of the bombing of an old "green army vehicle". The old car's registration plate was that of the separatist police chief, but the same licence plate was also seen on a different, new SUV.

On 22 February 2022, the Russian people's militias in Ukraine accused Ukraine of a "terrorist attack" that killed three civilians in a car on the Donetsk-Gorlovka highway. France 24 described the incident as a false flag attempt with corpses likely coming from a morgue to set up the scene.

Russia's alleged attempt to end the Donbas War

On 7 September 2022, at the Eastern Economic Forum, Putin claimed that Russia did not "start" any military operations, but was only trying to end those that started in 2014, after a "coup d’état in Ukraine". Conversely, Russia's annexation of Crimea in February 2014 is regarded as the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the intensity of the hostilities in the Donbas had been steadily declining since the signing of the Minsk agreements in February 2015.

Ukrainian biological and radiological weapons

Biological weapons labs

In March 2022, Russia alleged that Ukraine was developing biological weapons in a network of labs linked to the US.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China and Chinese state media amplified Russian claims. QAnon promoters also echo disinformation.
* BBC Reality Check found no evidence supporting the claims. The United Nations also refuted this. Russian biologists in and outside of Russia have debunked the claims, calling the allegations "transparently false".

According to researcher Adam Rawnsley, the Kremlin has a history of discrediting ordinary biology labs in former Soviet republics, and previously spread conspiracy theories about Georgia and Kazakhstan similar to those deployed against Ukraine.

Birds as bio-weapons

Prior to March 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defence made unsubstantiated accusations that the United States was manufacturing bio-weapons in Ukraine. In March the Ministry followed up with another conspiracy theory: the US was training birds to spread disease in Ukraine among Russian citizens, according to Major General Igor Konashenkov, spokesman for the Ministry of Russian state-controlled media. He mentioned specific details, including a strain of influenza with 50% mortality, and Newcastle disease. Media reports included maps, documents, and photos of birds with American military insignia, and claimed that infected birds had been captured alive in eastern Ukraine.

*

A U.S. State Department spokesman laughed these claims off and called them "outright lies", "total nonsense", "absurd", "laughable" and "propaganda". CIA Director William Burns told the U.S.Senate that Russia made these claims to prepare the terrain for a biological or chemical attack against Ukraine, which they would then blame on the United States and Ukraine.

Combat mosquitoes

On 28 October 2022 Vasily Nebenzya, Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations, accused Ukraine of using drones with "combat mosquitoes" which spread "dangerous viruses".

Ukrainian plans to use a dirty bomb

In March 2022, Russian state-controlled news agencies claimed, without evidence, that Ukraine was developing a plutonium-based dirty bomb nuclear weapon at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

In a series of calls to foreign defence officials made in October 2022, Russian Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu similarly claimed that Ukraine was preparing a "provocation" involving the use of a dirty bomb. The Institute for the Study of War suggested a desire to slow or suspend foreign aid to Ukraine as a possible motive for the allegations. The foreign ministries of France, the United Kingdom and the United States rejected "Russia's transparently false allegations". In a briefing, the Russian Ministry of Defence used photos of the Beloyarsk Nuclear Power Station, the Novosibirsk Chemical Concentrates Plant, the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and a photo from a 2010 presentation by the Slovenian as "evidence" for its claims.

Denial of Russian war crimes

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity were recorded and extensively documented, including attacks on civilians and energy-related infrastructure, wilful killings, unlawful confinement, torture, rape, and unlawful deportations of children. Russian officials denied the war crimes perpetrated by Russian forces. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the Bucha massacre a "fake attack" against Russia, claiming it was staged. He said that Russian forces had left Bucha on 30 March while evidence of killings had emerged, according to him, four days later.

*

On 4 April at the United Nations, Russian representative Vasily Nebenzya said that the bodies in the videos were not there when Russian forces withdrew from Bucha. This was contradicted by satellite images showing that the bodies were there as early as 19 March; the position of the corpses in the satellite images matches the smartphone photos taken in early April.

The Russian Defence Ministry's Telegram channel said Russian forces did not target civilians during the battle. According to them, a massacre could not have been covered up by the Russian military, and the mass grave in the city was filled with victims of Ukrainian airstrikes. The Ministry said it had analyzed a video purporting to show the bodies of dead civilians in Bucha, and the corpses were moving. The BBC's Moscow office investigated this claim and concluded there was no evidence the video had been staged. Russia also released a video that, according to the Kremlin, showed a corpse supposedly moving, although this was quickly deemed false after investigations by fact-checking websites determined that it was a corpse reflected in the rearview mirror of a car.

Another attempt to depict the massacre as fake aired on the Russian state television channel Russia-24, using a video that the channel claimed showed Ukrainians arranging mannequins in order to "stage" the Bucha massacre. The footage was quickly identified as coming from a television set filmed in Saint Petersburg. Workers for the television show confirmed that the video was from a Russian television show. Similarly, a video showing Ukrainian soldiers pulling dead bodies with cables in Bucha was widely shared by pro-Russian social media, supposedly to prove that the scene was staged. The provenance of the video is the Associated Press; its report explains that the use of cables was due to concern of the dead bodies being possibly booby-trapped. Videos showing Ukrainian forces searching for explosives under the corpses, falsely claiming they were placing the bodies to fake the massacre, were also shared in social media. Russian officials also blamed Ukrainian forces for the Mariupol theatre airstrike, though independent sources confirmed that Russia was responsible.

In November 2022, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases