The place occupied by the Tartars until the 19th century in the argumentation of Russian expansionism is occupied by the Nazis in the story of Vladimir Putin. The Tatars were the perfect enemy to demonize those whom the Russian empire targeted and, therefore, the alibi for conquest and territorial expansion.
Catherine the Great launched the Cossacks and the army of the Tsars against the Tatars in the Crimea and other points around the Black Sea. Her argument was to protect the Russian empire from those Turkmen warriors, subduing them or moving them away from their borders. But that argument was also the excuse to expand territory attacking the khanates in the west and in the Caucasus. In recent decades, the place that the Tartars had occupied as an alibi for expansionism, was replaced by the Nazis.
By the way, Nazism left its toxic mark in Ukraine, as in other countries where the interference, or plain and simple domination, of the soviet russia, generated visceral resistance. Rostock, in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, was part of the GDR and, as soon as that communist state disappeared, a neo-Nazi movement was formed that brutally attacked Vietnamese refugees and those from other countries, as happened in the pogrom of August 1992 in the Lichtenhagen district.
Just as Finland took advantage of the German invasion of the USSR to try to recover the territories that Stalin had taken from him in “The Winter War”, there were also leaders Ukrainian nationalists that they saw in “Operation Barbarossa” with which Hitler launched himself on Soviet territory an opportunity to get rid of Russia. Many of those leaders became Nazis or sought to be allies of the Nazis. 3rd Reich because he was the enemy of his enemy.
Stepan Bandera is one of those dark “proceres” left in Ukraine by the WWII. In part, due to the tragic mark caused by the Holodomor, a word that means to kill by hunger and names the genocide committed by Stalin that wiped out millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s.
From the cult of Stepan Bandera pro-Nazi groups emerged, such as the paramilitary Azov Battalion, later integrated into the army. However, the obvious reality is that the extreme right is found throughout Europe, even in Russia, where it managed to accumulate seats in the Duma with xenophobic leaders like Vladimir Zhirinovski, who always aligned his deputies with the ultra-nationalist policies of Vladimir Putin.
In all Central European countries there is waste Nazism. More so in countries like the Ukraine and Finland that took advantage of the German invasion of the USSR in World War II to settle pending accounts with Moscow. The Finns unsuccessfully tried to recover the territories lost in the Winter War, which was imposed on them by Stalin in 1939 to seize the Karelian Isthmus.
In Ukraine there are also toxic aftertastebut to describe the government and the Armed Forces of Ukraine as Nazis is to venture fully into the absurd to inoculate lysergic levels of demonization of the enemy it is intended to destroy.
So far did the Nazi invention to demonize the Ukrainians who, responding to the voices that counter the Kremlin versions by pointing out the fact that Zelensky is Jewish, Foreign Minister Sergei Labrov stated that Hitler had Jewish ancestry, an updated version of conspiracy theories that since remote times seek to portray the Jews as the authors of their own tragedies.
There are Filonazis all over Europe.
Describing the Ukrainian government as a Nazi power is simply a crude hoax to justify an unjustifiable invasion. If Ukraine had made a military attack on Russia, or perpetrated sabotage against Russian hydrocarbon production, or financed terrorism in Russia, or an attempt against the life of Russian rulers, or something that places her as an aggressor, the head of the Kremlin would not have had the need to lucubrate such a hoax to justify the war that he imposed on the neighboring country. A fable that resembles the hilarious story with which Emir Kusturica portrayed the levels of delirium that ultranationalism can engender when it comes to inventing enemies to justify domination.
The humbug of the “denazification” and the argument that the Russian army is liberating Ukraine from the Nazis, makes Vladimir Putin look like Marco Dren, the character from “Underground (once upon a country)”.
In the memorable film shot in the mid-1990s, nationalist poet Marko Dren hides Serbian families in a cellar to protect them from the army that Hitler had unleashed on Yugoslavia.
The protégés must make weapons for their protector to deliver to the partisans fighting the Nazis who occupy the Balkan country. But 20 years later, people are still making weapons in the basement, because Marko Dren is keeping them fooled by telling them that the war continues and that on the surface there are still the Nazis.
Both the inhabitants of the portion of the territory of Moldova that is in the hands of pro-Russian separatists who call it Transnistria, as well as those of many cities in Eastern Ukraine and in Russia itself, resemble the basement families of history that Dusán Kovacevic wrote and directed Kusturica.
The Russian president tries in reality what the delusional character of Underground achieved in fiction: convincing people who maintain disinformation that he is fighting against the Nazis.
Many inhabitants of the pro-Russian controlled Moldovan Transdniester and eastern cities of UkraineThey hope that the Russians will save them from Ukrainian Nazism.
The same is repeated like a broken record by the Russian media and all the Russian leaders and referents who do not want to end up imprisoned as Alexei Navalni and like the activists and protesters who protested against the war and the invasion, or riddled with bullets like Boris Nemtsov or like the journalist of the investigative portal The Insider, Oksana Baulina, murdered by Russian soldiers in the suburbs of kyiv.
Even in the rest of the world there are leaders of the left and right fascinated with Vladimir Putin, who tune in to the parallel reality created and spread by the Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus.
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