Disinfo: Only the ruling elite in Ukraine are Nazis, not ordinary Ukrainians

This is an new twist on the Nazi Ukraine narrative. One of the Kremlin’s most common disinformation narratives to justify its devastating war against Ukraine is the lie that Russia is pursuing the “denazification” of Ukraine. In reality, Ukraine is not a Nazi state, does not have a Nazi ruling elite and Nazism is not Ukraine’s ideology.

The myth of Nazi-ruled Ukraine has been the 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.

In 2015, Ukraine issued a ban on Nazi and Communist ideologies. On top of that, far-right groups had a limited presence during the Euromaidan protests and have suffered defeats in every national election after that, with a united front of all radical right-wing parties in the 2019 parliamentary elections winning only 2.15% of the vote falling far short of the 5% minimum guaranteeing entry into parliament.

This false myth of Nazi Ukraine is a clear propaganda narrative and served as one of the pretexts behind Russia's unjustified invasion of Ukraine. More than 140 international historians have denounced Russia’s “equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression,” calling Moscow’s propaganda “factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive” to the “victims of Nazism."

Learn more about the reasons behind the Kremlin's obsession with framing Ukraine as a Nazi state in the EUvsDisinfo analysis titled "Why does Putin portray himself as the tamer of neo-Nazism".

See similar cases: Limited military operation liberates LPR from the Ukrainian Nazi rule; Zelenskyy is only a marketing operation, a Jewish face for a Nazi regime; The real power in Ukraine is in the hands of extremists and neo-Nazis.