This morning I got to hear Rachel Maddow’s podcast focused entirely on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. At one point she brought up Putin’s claim that his invasion was to denazify Ukraine, and then dismissed that claim as total nonsense. While I have a lot of respect for Ms. Maddow and especially appreciate her including the deep histories that lead up to her current stories, she is way off on this one.
To make a very long story very short, during WWII the then government of Ukraine participated enthusiastically in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles. Rather than disowning those who led those atrocities, such as Stepan Bandera, the current government of Ukraine not only glorifies them and their organizations, they have made it a criminal offense to even mention their crimes against humanity or describe them as anything other than heroes.
The Nation had an article describing this in 2018 and even last year where it described a march in Kyiv to honor that same Ukrainian 14th Waffen SS Division being celebrated in the picture above, and challenged Anthony Blinken, himself a descendent of Holocaust survivors, to do what nobody else in the Ukrainian government would do: denounce it.
Now if you don’t think The Nation is a reliable enough source, Foreign Policy had an article back in 2016 by a former USAID project officer about how the Ukraine is whitewashing their Nazi past.
None of this of course justifies the Russian invasion. But ignoring the complexity of this story only supports the revisionism that glorifies Nazi criminals and makes more of their crimes inevitable.