Almost one month since Ukraine agreed to a US-led unconditional ceasefire, Russia has this week come up with yet another excuse to avoid following suit. Speaking in Moscow on April 7, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that while Russian President Vladimir Putin backs calls for a ceasefire, questions remain over the Ukrainian government’s alleged inability to control “a number of extremist and nationalist units that simply do not obey Kyiv.”
This latest excuse is a variation of the tired old trope about “Ukrainian Nazis” that has been used exhaustively by the Kremlin since 2014 to legitimize Russia’s escalating aggression against Ukraine. For more than a decade, Putin’s propagandists have been depicting Ukraine as a hotbed of far-right extremism as part of a disinformation campaign designed to dehumanize ordinary Ukrainians and prepare the ground for the wholesale erasure of Ukrainian national identity. It therefore comes as no surprise that Moscow is now citing this phantom fascist threat in order to rebuff calls for a ceasefire.
In reality, Ukrainian public support for far-right political parties is among the lowest in Europe. After years of failure at the ballot box, Ukraine’s nationalist parties formed a coalition ahead of the country’s last prewar parliamentary elections in 2019, but could only collectively muster 2.16 percent of the vote. That same year, Ukrainians also elected Russian-speaking Jewish comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the country’s president. Zelenskyy’s Jewish heritage has helped highlight the absurdity of Russia’s “Nazi” narrative, forcing Kremlin officials to engage in increasingly ridiculous mental gymnastics. Most notoriously, during a 2022 interview with Italian television, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sought to defend Moscow’s baseless claims by declaringthat Adolf Hitler “also had Jewish blood.”
Voice of Ukraine 