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Reader: Is Putin's purpose of invading Ukraine to fight Nazism?
FactCheck.org Director Eugene Kiely: In March, Russian President Vladimir Putin stated that the purpose of his invasion is to “demilitarize and de-Nazify” Ukraine. As reported by NPR, Putin said:
"The purpose of this operation is to protect people who for eight years now have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime," he said, according to an English translation from the Russian Mission in Geneva. "To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation."
We wrote about Putin’s claim in our story “The Facts on ‘De-Nazifying’ Ukraine.”
As Deputy Managing Editor Rob Farley wrote in that story, more than 300 historians who study genocide, Nazism and World War II signed a statement that said Putin’s rhetoric about de-Nazifying fascists among Ukraine’s elected leadership is “propaganda.”
Rob interviewed one of the authors of that statement, Eugene Finkel, an associate professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, who told him that the influence of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi faction is relatively small.
“Neo-Nazi, far right and xenophobic groups do exist in Ukraine, like in pretty much any other country, including Russia,” Finkel said. “They are vocal and can be prone to violence but they are numerically small, marginal and their political influence at the state level is non-existent. That is not to say that Ukraine doesn’t have a far-right problem. It does. But I would consider the KKK in the US and skinheads and neo-Nazi groups in Russia a much bigger problem and threat than the Ukrainian far right.”
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