Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was asked on Sunday morning about Russian claims of nazism in the Eastern European nation. Prior to the ongoing ground invasion that he ordered, Russian President Vladimir Putin cited a need for “denazification,” listing the decapitating of the current Ukrainian government as part of that mission.
Zelensky responded to those charges in detail for the first time while speaking to Fareed Zakaria on CNN, noting some of the absurdities involved and also discussing what Putin’s claim means in practice.
Zelensky would make an odd Nazi, considering he’s Jewish, and the idea that the Ukrainian government is overrun with Nazis is a position that lacks any real evidence. Yes, there is a military unit that draws its lineage from nazism, as a counter to communism during the 20th century. What most of its individual members believe or practice today is a bit murkier, but it’s safe to assume some objectionable thought still exists among its ranks.
I say that to say that it’s not completely false that there are Nazi elements within Ukraine. Still, that doesn’t at all represent a defensible reason for Russia to invade. I think that’s the context that must remain front and center, when having any discussion on this matter. Should the Ukrainian government do more to combat nazism within its borders? Perhaps they should, but that’s not Russia’s job, nor are Russian claims meant to be anything other than a pretense for aggression against a sovereign neighbor.
Republicans in the United States have a pretty good understanding of what it’s like to be discredited and maligned as “Nazis” when such an ideology is only represented among a tiny subset of the American public (and few of those people even hold mainline GOP thought). Donald Trump is not a Nazi. Volodymyr Zelensky is not a Nazi. Generalizations like that are meant to assign collective guilt to large populations in order to justify bad action against them.
That’s dangerous in any context, and it’s especially dangerous in Ukraine at the moment, which was the main point Zelensky settled on in this interview. Yes, it’s laughable to suggest that Ukraine is so eaten up with nazism that it justifies a Russian invasion, but it’s also an incredibly serious matter when you have an invading force with the mission to essentially cleanse a population of a supposed ideology. As right-leaning Americans have long stated domestically, if you label a political opponent a Nazi, you can essentially justify doing anything to them in our modern society, up to and including violence.
To wrap this up, it is my belief that you can’t look at foreign countries the same way you look at the United States. Obviously, there are cultural differences, but there are also vast practical differences on the ground regarding how a nation can be successfully governed. Ukraine is not perfect, and I think it’s pointless to obfuscate the issues there. Still, at the end of the day, Russia is illegally invading a sovereign country. There will be a time to argue about Ukraine’s internal affairs when that invasion ends. Until then, Russia remains the “bad” party in all this, and no amount of social media banter about supposed nazism will change that.