The Russian interpretation of the Second World War serves as a major conceptual tool to make the West “the other” both in Putin’s own thinking and in broadly circulated propaganda about the Ukraine war in the Russian media. Because Nazism has been so firmly rejected by world actors after 1945, this stark representation of Russian inherent goodness versus Western/Ukrainian Nazi evil is a dangerous falsehood. ![]() This reinterpretation of the Second World War mixes up the two warring sides, as in a kaleidoscope, and reshapes them into a pattern that reinforces Russia’s existential divide from the West. Putin’s speech creates a sharp “us” versus “them” divide through this contemporary reimagining of the war, with the United States, NATO, and Ukraine branded as Nazis/Fascists while Russia stands for the heroically anti-Fascist Soviet Union. In Putin’s remarks, the Second World War exists both in the past and in the present. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (right) meets with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy in December, 2021. According to Putin, the invasion was necessary to prevent future NATO-backed “Nazi” aggression, which Putin implicitly compared to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. In order not to repeat this mistake, Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine to “stop that atrocity, that genocide of the millions of people” in the Donbass. He admitted that the Soviet Union had made a mistake in trying to “appease” the “potential aggressor” in 19 and failed “to defend itself from an imminent attack” until it was “too late.” In justifying the timing of the “special military operation,” Putin cited a historical lesson drawn from the Soviet Union’s experience in World War II (WWII). ![]() Putin called the Ukrainians, whose territory Russia’s armies were about to invade, “far-right nationalists and Neo-Nazis” who, backed by their NATO allies, were committing “genocide” against Russians. In Putin’s retelling, Russia, though it was the country launching an invasion, stood for the heroic Soviet Union during the “sacred” Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), protecting the world from Nazi genocide. He argued that the people of Eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region who wanted to declare independence from Ukraine and join Russia were experiencing “ humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime.” His mission, he claimed, was “to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.” Russian President Vladimir Putin in February, 2022. ![]() In Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 speech announcing Russia’s “special military operation”-in fact a full-scale invasion of Ukraine intended to topple the Ukrainian government-the Russian president framed the current Russia-Ukraine conflict through the lens of the horrors of the Second World War.
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