One myth that keeps cropping up about Ukraine is that it has been plagued by outsized far right or neo-Nazi influences, particularly during the Maidan protests of 2014 and the later Donbas conflict.
This claim is a favourite of Jeffrey Sachs, echoed in recent articles in P and I by Paul Heywood-Smith and Keri McKern, who lauds John Pilger’s writing on Ukraine. Vladimir Putin stated “denazification” was a key aim of his 2022 invasion. Pilger made plenty of assertions along these lines, but the only examples given in his 2014 article, such as his version of May 2014 clashes in Odesa, turned out to be gross distortions.
However, accounts by Ukrainian activists and observers on the spot have comprehensively dismantled the claim that the far right or neo-Nazis dominated the Maidan protests in 2013-14, let alone helped orchestrate a “coup”. Ultranationalist groups like Svoboda and Right Sector were just one element among many in the protest movement, in which hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, took part across the country. They included people of every political stripe, from far left to far right, sick of the corruption of the Yanukovych government and its subordination to Moscow. Cathy Young thoroughly debunks persistent misconceptions about the Maidan Revolution and alleged Western involvement here,
Every Russian democrat of any note says exactly the same. I would thoroughly recommend a documentary by the award-winning Russian Proekt team, now forced into exile. It shows “How Putin actually started the war with Ukraine”, preparing long in advance to take over Crimea and start local uprisings.
This started long before President Yanukovych fled and the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove him by 328 votes to nil (including 36 members of his own party and 30 from the often pro-Russian Communists). The key issue for Putin, by the way, was Ukraine’s aspirations for closer integration with the EU, not the prospect of NATO membership.
The parliament installed after early elections were called in May 2014 had 6 members out of 423 from a far right party (Svoboda). Svoboda – with a program reminiscent of One Nation – won only 4.7% of votes. In the next, 2019 elections it won only one seat, and only 2% of votes. Compare this, for example, to Germany, where Alternative für Deutschland garnered 16% in the recent European Parliamentary elections, or 31% for Marine Le Pen’s party in France. As historian Alexander Motyl explains, Ukraine is actually an outlier in Europe, having no strong radical right parties since 1991.
Much of the fuss made about the far right and neo-Nazis centres on the Azov regiment, which took a leading role in combating Russian and separatist forces during the Donbas rebellion at a time when the Kyiv government was in a weak position to resist: its armed forces were in a parlous state after years of corruption and Russian white-anting under Yanukovych.
Azov at the beginning certainly had a far right ultranationalist element, along with plain old football hooligans. However, by the end of 2014 it was integrated with the Ukrainian armed forces, and links to far right political groups were severed. It became a regular unit of the National Guard, but was popular among many Ukrainians for its role in national resistance. It recruited people from a variety of backgrounds, including Muslims and Jews.
Afghan-Ukrainian Mariam Naiem has debunked the idea of the outsize role of Azov or the far right, as have Alasdair McCallum of Monash University, the Russian-Israeli analyst Vyacheslav Likhachev, and Jewish Ukrainian academic Galyna Piskorska, now in Australia.
Not so spontaneous separatism
So Pilger’s image of an infestation of “Ukronazis” evaporates on closer inspection. But what about claims that Kyiv and its supporters, including Azov, were responsible for repressions and mass killings of ethnic Russian civilians in the Donbas conflict? Putin himself claimed, as one of his pretexts for the 2022 full scale invasion, that there had been a dangerous surge in such attacks.
This is another myth. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that altogether about 3,100 local civilians were killed in eight years of fighting from 2014-2022. In 2020-2021 there were only 51 civilian deaths in total, the lowest number of annual casualties, many from land mines laid by Russian forces. The OSCE Monitoring Mission reported that 85% of weapons-related ceasefire violations in 2021 came from the Russian side.
What has become clear with time is that the so-called “separatist” uprising in the Donbas, which started not longer after Yanukovych fled, was not very spontaneous at all. As shown in the Proekt documentary, it was largely incited and orchestrated by Russian security agencies with the help of right-wing oligarchs and former criminals, plus people bussed in from Russia. When the pro-Russian groups found little resonance among the local population and lost ground, Russian armed forces intervened directly to save their bacon.
This picture has not only been put together by independent Russian, Ukrainian and other researchers, such as the The Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies. It has also been confirmed by none either than Igor Girkin, leading ringmaster of separatism, later found guilty in absentia in the Netherlands for his role in the shooting down of flight MH17. As well as by leaked tapes of conversations of other Russian operatives, including the Glazyev tapes and the leaked Surkov emails.
This assessment was confirmed by the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in January last year that the Russian state had had effective control over occupied areas of the Donbas from May 2014.
Where are the real fascists?
When considering who the real Nazis or fascists are, we would do better to look at the regime Russia has imposed across the swathes of Ukrainian territories it occupies and has annexed. It feels like an amalgam of the Nazis’ 1941-44 Reichskomissariat Ukraine and the Neapoletan Camorra.
These crimes have been documented in detail by the United Nations, human rights NGOs and Russian and Ukrainian journalists and activists. I summarised them here. They include widespread torture, murders, disappearances and arbitrary detention of civic leaders and civilians; rape and sexual violence, including of male prisoners; forced deportations of children; illegal population transfers; large-scale and often corrupt expropriation of businesses and homes; and the eradication of Ukrainian culture and identity along with enforced indoctrination of schoolchildren.
The gangster statelets of Donetsk and Luhansk, marked from the start in 2014 by abductions and murders of journalists, dissenters and bystanders. Likewise, the very nasty regime occupying Crimea, as adjudicated by the European Court of Human Rights.
Moreover, to find a state showing the hallmarks of fascism we need look no further than Russia itself. As Russian political scientist Vladislav Inozemtsev argues, Putin’s Russia by 2022 displayed four key pillars of fascism:
– irredentism (the goal of uniting as many members of a “people” as possible in one state) and militarisation
– intrusive state control and direction of the economy
– the dominant role of internal security and police organs “to give the new Duce absolute power”
– deployment of unified symbolism and propaganda through a near monolithic media and education system: the cult of the glorious past, described well by Jade McGlynn, deploys myth and memory to legitimise repression at home and imperialism abroad.
We also observe other elements often associated with fascist regimes:
– elevating hypermasculinity along with “traditional” values, including a Handmaid’s Tale approach to women’s rights (e.g. by decriminalising domestic violence; and mooted legislation to criminalise “extremist ideology” that argues women need not have children, or giving fathers the right to veto abortions);
– persecution of queer people (declaring the LGBT+ movement “extremist” and gaoling people just for wearing rainbow earrings or running a gay bar).
Highly regarded Russian sociologist Greg Yudin agrees Russia can now be called a fascist state, as does Elina Dovlikanova. Robert Horvath of Latrobe University describes how the Putin regime has itself cultivated and co-opted homegrown Russian neo-Nazis over many years. Meanwhile, genuine left-wing critics like Boris Kargalitsky are imprisoned along with other democratic opponents, like Vladimir Kara-Murza. And the Kremlin is funding and cultivating far-right politicians and movements across Europe and Western countries.
A daily stream of rhetoric on Russian state TV that can only be called genocidal fits this pattern. Putin’s allies and spokespeople demand the drowning of Ukrainian children or to “kill them all”. Former President Dmitry Medvedev calls Ukrainians cockroaches that need exterminating. Senator and former Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin says “it is time to burn everything Ukrainian down to the root” so that “there is no trace left.” The head of RT (Russia Television) Margarita Simonyan justifies torture. MP Aleksey Zhuravlyov calculates that some 2 million people “must be denazified, which means to be destroyed.”
Putin’s own 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” serves as a blueprint for denying Ukraine’s right to exist as a separate nation and people. The Russian Orthodox Patriarch and priests have become auxiliaries to this ideology, sanctifying the invasion as a “holy war” against “homo-Euro integration” or enforced “gay parades”.
Such ideas have long been voiced by outright fascist thinkers like Ivan Ilyin, rehabilitated by Putin, and contemporary ideologues he has favoured like Aleksandr Dugin, who declared “We are fighting the absolute evil, embodied in Western civilisation, its liberal-totalitarian hegemony, in Ukrainian Nazism…”. This is the kind of anti-wokeism that attracts the likes of Tucker Carlson.
As Julia Davis notes, there is a widespread consensus in state-controlled media that “denazification” means anyone who resists Russian rule is by definition a Nazi and fair game for elimination. One compendium of eliminationist rhetoric by Russian leaders and propagandists is very long. Scholars like Katrina Hook, Neil Abrams and Francine Hirsch argue that this evidence of genocidal intent, along with a pattern of atrocities with intent to destroy Ukrainians as a national group, constitute serious violations of the Genocide Convention.
So I would respectfully suggest that buying into the denazification narrative risks ending up on the wrong side of history. It’s worth recalling that vilifying opponents as Nazis has been a favourite tactic of the nastier elements in the Kremlin since Stalin’s purges and show trials in the 1930s. Old Bolsheviks like Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, and leading generals, were executed for allegedly being in league with Nazi Germany.
Or later assassinated, like Leon Trotsky. It’s no coincidence, as the Soviets used to say, that the Russian occupation regime in Ukraine has renamed a street in Melitopol after Stalin’s hitman Pavel Sudoplatov, who organised Trotsky’s 1940 murder.
Jon Richardson
Jon Richardson is a former Australian diplomat who covered Eastern Europe from Moscow (in the USSR and later Russia), Belgrade, London and Canberra. He also served as High Commissioner in Nigeria and Ghana. Prior to joining DFAT he was a postgraduate researcher and tutor in Soviet history and politics at the ANU
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