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Comment by poizan42 | Hacker News Reader

The right wing "ultranationalist" party Svoboda (In electoral alliance with National Corps, Right Sector, Ukrainian Volunteer Army (Azov), Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists) managed to get 2.15% of the votes at the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election.

It's pretty difficult for me to see how Ukraine can be "overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups" with that amount of support for their right-wing parties.

Unless of course you live in Russia's fantasy world where a Jewish president can be a neo-nazi

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> Unless of course you live in Russia's fantasy world where a Jewish president can be a neo-nazi

Without arguing about the rest of the comment, Russian narrative sees Nazis as a group that want to exterminate Russians, based on what actual Nazis in WW2 did when they attacked. And this "Jewish president" who banned Russian language, banned almost all political parties and organizations of russian-speaking people and sent an army to punish the rebellion in Donbas fits the Russian definition of Nazi pretty well.

> who banned Russian language

That's an invention by Sergey Lavrov. Of course Ukraine didn't ban the native language of 30% of it's population.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jun/08/sergey-lav...

> banned almost all political parties and organizations of russian-speaking people

Ukraine did in fact ban pro-Russian parties. While I must admit I don't particularly like the idea of banning any parties in a democracy, it is understandable why you would ban parties and organizations supporting the enemy while you are at war.

This is, however, a long shot from the claim the he banned almost all political parties and organizations of russian-speaking people.

Per Wikipedia, the 2019 law says "All schools and universities are required to teach in Ukrainian". I don't know how Politifact managed to find the opposite of that statement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#Ana...

On the other hand, a president who natively speaks Russian himself who respected the ceasefire with the Russian-administered "independent" republics and took a more dovish stance than his predecessor doesn't seem like someone who is obviously on the cusp of exterminating Russians. Putin's armies killed far more Russian-Ukranians than even the worst Ukrainian racists could have managed.

There is a grain of truth in your statement though: Russian narrative does define Nazis differently from the rest of the world (and indeed, from Hitler). It defines everyone that doesn't wish to be subjugated by Russia as Nazis.

It's interesting because if you watch one of the interviews with Azov members, this is how they see themselves, as well. They adopt the Nazi aesthetic and ideology not because a hatred of Jews, but a hatred of Russians, and rejection of Russian culture. They look at the battle of Stalingrad and say 1 million wasn't nearly enough, and call modern Russia a communist state. It's really wild to hear.

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