[yakshaving_jgt]

“I am a Nazi.”

— Alexey Milchakov, field commander of the Rusich neo-Nazi paramilitary group in russia.

The war was never about Nazism. The russians use the word “Nazi” to describe anyone who opposes russia. The official russian position on WWII is that it started in 1941 (when Operation Barbarossa started, and not the invasion of Poland), and russia’s official position is that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact never existed.

Russia is full of Nazis, and the russians were allied with Nazi Germany in WWII.

The war in Ukraine today is not about Naziism.

[mingus88]

I think we often forget that Russian propaganda is also often aimed at Russians and not the west.

Nazis invaded Russia and calling their neighbors Nazis is meant to invoke fear and imminent danger to the Russian people. It’s a completely different vibe than calling right wingers Nazis in the US

[aguaviva]

It also feeds into their "Ukraine is not really a country" narrative.

Because how do we know it's not really a country? Because it's overrun with zombies (Nazis), of course.

[tim333]

The Russians have a strange relationship with Nazism. They enthusiastically partnered with Hitler in 1939 to take over Europe and only went 'anti nazi' when Hitler turned on them.

They now call their opponents nazis when they behave more like the German nazi party than any other country on earth. I can't help but think it's a propaganda thing to call the enemies nazis to distract from behaving that way themselves.

I mean who rolled tanks into Ukraine to grab the territory for themselves and drive their 'lesser people' into submission? Putin's invasion is pretty much a copy of Hitlers.

[JetSpiegel]

If by "enthusiastically" you mean sign a secret pact that was violated a few years afterwards, sure.

Molotov-Ribbentrop was not exactly shouted from rooftops, it wasn't even officially acknowledged until decades later.

[aguaviva]

The exact protocol was kept secret. But the alliance itself was no secret at all -- the whole world knew about it, and there were open "victory parades" in major cities like Brest, Lwów, and Grodno. They even built elaborate "Victory Arches" with swastikas and red stars side by side.

If that doesn't count as a signal of "enthusiasm", I don't know what does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_military...