Is Ukraine Really a Neo-Nazi Threat to Russia?

In Foreign Policy, Thomas Sherlock suggests Russia’s claims that Ukraine is filled with neo nazis have taken a hit to its credibility. Sherlock writes:

As he condemned the mutiny of Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in late June, Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated his justification for the invasion of Ukraine. According to Putin, Russia had to eliminate the dire threat of a hostile Ukraine armed by the West and guided by a fascist ideology nurtured by the United States. Russia was “fighting fiercely for its future, repelling the aggression of neo-Nazis and their masters.” In late July, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov affirmed that Russia would never abandon the supposed goal of eliminating the Western-backed neo-Nazi danger.

The Kremlin has long used the antifascist struggle of the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call World War II, as a framework to explain and justify its domestic and foreign policies. The application of this narrative to the war in Ukraine is now buckling under pressure. As he launched his short-lived revolt, Prigozhin maintained in a posted video that Russia’s corrupt military leadership had deceived Putin into believing that NATO and Ukraine were preparing to attack Russia: The invasion of Ukraine wasn’t needed to safeguard Russia from a manufactured neo-Nazi threat. About a month later, on July 20, CIA Director William Burns observed that Prigozhin’s video, which was widely viewed in Russia, “was the most scathing indictment of Putin’s rationale for war … that I have heard from a Russian or a non-Russian.”

Prigozhin’s claim that the military leadership manipulated the justification for war further undermines popular and elite belief in an imminent neo-Nazi threat from Ukraine managed by the United States. While a majority of respondents in Russian surveys voice support for the Russian military in Ukraine, observers suggest this stance may often reflect dissembling or weakly held rationalizations. In a recent survey, a majority of respondents supported the war (43 percent indicated “strong support”). But 41 percent also believed the invasion had created more harm than benefit for Russia. Among the 38 percent who perceived more benefit than harm, only 9 percent thought the value of the “special military operation” was in its “protection against fascism and Nazism,” and even fewer respondents (3 percent) believed the war had rallied the support of society.

Nevertheless, Putin remains committed to the weaponization of historical memory against the West and Ukraine. This discursive approach builds on Putin’s pre-invasion charges of antisemitism and genocide against Russia’s foreign critics, condemning the behavior of Poles, Ukrainians, and other regional actors during World War II for assisting in the Holocaust. Unlike the Soviet regime, Putin’s rendition of the Great Patriotic War now openly commemorates the Red Army’s role in ending the Nazi genocide against the Jews.

This conceptual pivot marked an escalation in Russia’s response to the long-standing accusations by governments and groups in Eastern Europe that Soviet behavior during this period was itself genocidal. Just as narratives of victimization in Eastern Europe were often linked to the efforts of post-communist elites at state- and nation-building that cast the Soviet Union as a malevolent “other,” the Kremlin has now reinforced its opposing account. For Putin, Russians and Jews were both victims of genocide in World War II. This revised narrative encouraged the Kremlin to falsely identify Ukraine’s policies toward Russian speakers in the Donbas region as genocide and the invasion of 2022 as a necessary response. Putin has used this claim of genocide, which lacks any supporting evidence (civilian casualties in Donbas remained relatively low for the period from 2015 to 2022), to establish another link between the Great Patriotic War, the Holocaust, and the most recent invasion.

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