Why does Putin say the Ukrainians are Nazis?

Are we gonna split hairs here? Am I wrong?

Since Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, he’s consistently referred to the elected Ukrainian government as “Nazis” or “Neo-Nazis”, and said the purpose of his war was to “de-Nazify” the country. While it’s common for us nowadays to call any political opponent a Nazi (I can’t think of any American President in my lifetime who hasn’t been compared to Hitler), Putin’s reasons for doing so go beyond simply reaching for a word that is now just a synonym for “bad guy”. This week we’ll look into the history of Ukraine, examine some of the reasons for Putin’s Nazi-fixation, and see if there’s any justification for what he’s talking about.

Banderites and Ukrainian Nationalists in WW2

Far-right demonstrators carrying Stepan Bandera’s portrait, 2020

Putin has regularly called the Ukrainian government “Banderites” in an attempt to link them to the activities of anti-Soviet guerillas during WW2. Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was a Ukrainian far-right nationalist who grew up in an area that fell under Polish jurisdiction after the various European empires were carved up following the First World War. During the 1920s he joined underground Ukrainian organizations opposed to Polish and Soviet rule. Objectively, Bandera was a fascist: his goal was to establish an independent Ukraine purged of Jews, Poles, and other minorities. In the 30s Bandera carried out a string of terrorist bombings and assassinations in Poland, and was sentenced to life in prison, but he escaped during the Nazi invasion in 1939. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, Bandera offered his assistance to the Nazis, proposing that they support an independent Ukraine (led by Bandera, of course). This was not really on the Germans’ roadmap: they wanted to kill off the population of Ukraine and take the region's ample food resources to feed Germany. Undeterred by this cool reception, Bandera’s organization issued a declaration of Ukrainian independence in the summer of 1941. The Germans reacted to this by arresting Bandera and sending him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the outskirts of the capital. 

Late in the war, the Germans let Bandera out of prison and considered sending him behind the Soviet lines to fight as a guerilla with other members of his organization. However, after discussing it amongst themselves (and realizing they’d probably die) Bandera and his leadership team decided against it, and he ended up in the Western occupation zone after the war. Bandera continued to organize anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance from West Germany, and he had ties to British and US intelligence. Despite living under a false identity, the KGB caught up with Bandera and assassinated him in 1959.

Bandera was kept well away from the frontlines by the Germans for the duration of the war, but his followers carried out massacres in Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine in their quest for a purified ethnostate. And though he wasn’t out there digging the mass graves himself, Bandera knew what was going on, and this pattern of ethnic cleansing fit in well with his ideals: he blamed the Jews for Soviet communism and wanted to exterminate the Jewish and Polish population in areas he claimed for his vision of an independent Ukraine.

So all-in-all, a pretty nasty guy, and a typical Nazi collaborator of the sort that could be found all over Europe during the war years. Considering that he was a fuck-up who didn’t actually achieve anything, you might wonder why Bandera hasn’t faded into obscurity. We’ll get there in a minute.

In addition to Bandera’s organization, a large number of Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis by joining the Waffen-SS or by serving as local police and concentration camp guards. Anti-Soviet sentiment was widespread in Ukraine before the war because of the way the Bolsheviks had quashed aspirations for an independent Ukrainian state after the Russian revolution, and more recently because the Soviet-engineered famine in the late 30s had killed something like 4 million Ukrainians. Nazi propaganda made use of the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” to convince the local population that the Soviet Union was secretly run by the Jews. These factors, along with simple opportunism and the desire to earn a few Reichsmarks lead many Ukrainians to collaborate with the Nazis. But I should point out these same scenes of collaboration played out all over Europe: Ukraine was not unique in this regard. The same thing happened in France, the Netherlands, and a dozen other countries. Also, millions of Ukrainians fought for the Soviet Union, either in the Red Army or as anti-Nazi guerillas. It’s simply not the case that wartime Ukraine was a fascist snake pit: plenty of Ukrainians believed in the Soviet project and gave their lives to defend it. 

After the war, a sizeable contingent of Ukrainian nationalist fighters (including members of Bandera’s organization) continued a guerilla campaign against the Soviet re-occupation of the country. The last of them weren’t wiped out until 1960, and in the process about 150,000 people were killed in western Ukraine as guerillas fought first against the advancing Red Army, and then against the NKVD secret police after the war. Not something you hear about in history class, but it happened. While some of these people had legitimate anti-totalitarian motives, many of them shared Bandera’s fascist & antisemitic ideas. From that point onward, “Banderite” became a commonly-used term in the USSR to smear all Ukrainian nationalists as closet-Nazis: Putin has simply revived the use of the term.

In recent years, some Ukrainian politicians have tried to rehabilitate Bandera’s image and promote him as a patriotic hero, while ignoring his nasty activities. In 2010, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded Bandera the title “Hero of Ukraine,” a move which was condemned by Russia, the EU, and Jewish organizations. Some Ukrainians have continued commemorating Bandera, others are opposed to his re-invention as a national hero. A statue of Bandera was erected in the city of Lviv in 2007, it's been blown up by vandals twice and replaced each time. The controversy over memorials to Bandera and his comrades-in-arms can be compared to the situation with Confederate memorials in the US: substitute Robert E. Lee for Bandera and you get the idea. The Zelensky government has not promoted any commemoration of Bandera, but he’s still popular among some segments of the population in western Ukraine where his organization’s guerilla activities took place. So that’s where this comes from: as part of the search for national heroes in a country still seeking to define itself, some people have dug up nasty characters like Bandera and presented them to the Ukrainian public as role models, but not everyone buys into this.

The uses of wartime memory

2023 Victory Day parade in Moscow, featuring a WW2-era T34 tank and Soviet iconography.

Throughout his rule, Putin has sought to invoke the memory of WW2 to build support for his regime and crush his opponents. The memory of the war has become highly simplified under Putin, with all of the inconvenient Soviet war crimes and massacres swept under the rug, and Stalin’s 1939-1941 alliance with Hitler minimized or ignored. Instead, history is reduced to a simple storybook tale in which a Russian-led Soviet Union won the war against ultimate evil without much help from the corrupt Western powers. Putin revels in military parades with Russian troops cosplaying as soldiers from the WW2 period, and his speeches frequently link the war against the Nazis to his war in Ukraine and Russia’s conflict with the West. At the same time, he has banned or suppressed organizations like Memorial, a Nobel Prize-winning NGO that seeks to document human rights violations and mass-murders from the Soviet era. In Putin’s mind, the Soviet period was a highpoint of Russian history, and he’s stated that the loss of Russia’s imperial domain in Eastern Europe was a “tragedy”. Linking the Ukrainians with the Nazis is a simple way of translating this framework into the modern day, with Putin and his regime as the good guys, and Ukraine and its Western backers as the bad guys.

Azov and the Ukrainian far-right

One group often cited by Putin as a Ukrainian neo-Nazi organization is the Azov Brigade, which was first organized as an anti-Russian volunteer militia at the time of the Crimea invasion in 2014. This is one charge that may actually have some merit, but as we’ll see, Russian propaganda greatly exaggerates the influence of far-right organizations in Ukraine.

The Azov Brigade was founded by extremist far-right political activists, and it has used Nazi-like iconography from its inception (see image below). Initially Azov called itself “the Black Corps”, which was also the wartime nickname of the Waffen-SS. However, the Azov Brigade was later integrated into the regular Ukrainian armed forces and de-politicized. Most of the neo-Nazi types were pushed out at that time, the original leadership has moved on, and now Azov is run by professional army officers instead of political activists. Regardless of the changes, Russian propaganda has centered on the Azov Brigade as a sort of Ukrainian super-Nazi organization that secretly runs the government. Captured Azov soldiers have been put on trial as terrorists in Russia rather than being treated as normal POWs. Azov’s current iconography does still allude to SS runes, and the organization's far-right roots can’t be denied. But it’s hard to say how many of the current Azov members are the original Proud Boys militia-types, and how many of them are normal rank-and-file soldiers. Azov is just one unit with a membership of around 2,000 in an army with more than 1 million total members: they don’t run the Ukrainian government or the armed forces. It’s also worth pointing out that Azov has numerous Jewish members serving currently and has not been accused of any antisemitic activities during the war. So while they are still weirdly attached to their SS-tribute logo, it’s not accurate to say that the current iteration of the Azov Brigade is a neo-Nazi organization.

Former emblem of the Azov Brigade circa 2015, which used a Neo-Nazi Black Sun insignia (background), and a runic symbol that was also used by the 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich”.

Far-right quasi-fascist political parties do exist in modern Ukraine, just as they do in every other European country, but they don’t have much popular support. In the last parliamentary election, far-right parties managed to scrape together about 2% of the popular vote, and they only have a single seat in parliament. These extremist far-right parties have no significant influence on Ukrainian government policy, and if we needed any further proof that Ukraine isn’t run by Nazis, President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. He’s also the grandson of a Red Army colonel who fought on the Soviet side in WW2, so no Banderites here.

Who’s the real Nazi?

To put Ukraine’s alleged Nazi sympathies in an appropriate context, let’s look at Germany, which is the kind of prosperous, democratic European country Ukraine aspires to be. In the last German federal election, the far-right Nazi-wannabe Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party won 83 seats in parliament, taking about 10% of the popular vote. Compare that to a single seat held by far-right parties in Ukraine, with a popular vote percentage in the low single-digits. In Germany, there’s recently been a wave of arrests in the armed forces as the intelligence services have uncovered plots by right-wing service members to commit acts of terrorism or overthrow the government. In 2020 Germany had to disband one of its elite special-forces units because it had been infiltrated and taken over by neo-Nazis. And earlier this year there was widespread outrage when a group of AfD politicians and other right-wing extremists held a closed-door meeting where they plotted to deport millions of non-European naturalized German citizens. So by comparison, Ukraine’s issues with far-right politics seem pretty mild. France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and other European countries have large right-wing extremist parties with a much greater influence over politics and society than they do in Ukraine, but Putin hasn’t spoken about any need to “de-Nazify” those places.

So, in case you needed any further convincing, Putin is indeed just exaggerating and making things up. His main fear is that Ukraine becomes an independent country aligned with Western institutions like the EU and NATO. To justify his war-mongering, he’s focused on far-right extremists in Ukraine who don’t actually have much influence over the nation’s politics, and linked them to vintage fascist villains like Stepan Bandera. When you consider that Putin has consolidated his rule of Russia through political oppression, stifling of dissent, prison camps, murder of political opponents, ethno-chauvinism, and aggressive territorial expansion, it’s modern Russia that most closely resembles Hitler’s Germany, not Ukraine. 

If you have a question or topic you want me to write about next, email distilledhistory@substack.com