In what is likely to cause considerable anger in the White House, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has compared US President Donald Trump’s “America First” message to Nazi propaganda. The provocative statement by Russia’s top diplomat offers a glimpse into the mood in Moscow as the US and Russia hold preliminary talks on a possible deal to end their invasion of Ukraine.
In an article published February 4 in the journal Russia in Global Affairs, Lavrov accused the United States of undermining the international order with “cowboy attacks” and said the Trump administration’s rhetoric was reminiscent of Nazi Germany. “The concept of ‘America First’ bears a disturbing resemblance to the slogan of ‘Germany Above All’ during the time of Hitler,” he wrote.
Such attacks are nothing new, of course. The Kremlin has a long history of branding critics and opponents as Nazis, dating back to the height of the Cold War. When Hungarians rose up against Soviet occupation in 1956, Moscow denounced the uprising as a “fascist rebellion” before sending in tanks. It was a similar story during the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. Communist officials even called the Berlin Wall an “anti-fascist defensive wall.”
The trend survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and was enthusiastically embraced by Putin’s regime. Labeling opponents as Nazis is considered a particularly effective tactic in modern Russia because it strikes an emotional chord with an audience raised to revere the Soviet Union’s staggering sacrifices in the fight against Nazi Germany.
Throughout Putin’s rule, domestic political opponents, including Alexei Navalny, have been regularly demonized as Nazis. The same strategy has often been employed on the international stage. When Estonia tried to remove a Soviet World War II monument from central Tallinn in 2007, the Kremlin media went into a frenzy about “fascist Estonia,” sparking unrest among Estonia’s sizable ethnic Russian population. A long list of other international critics and opponents have faced the same Nazi slurs.
The most notorious accusations of Nazism against Russia have been leveled against Ukraine. Since Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, Russian state propaganda has sought to portray Ukrainian national identity as a modern form of fascism that is virtually indistinguishable from Nazism. This propaganda campaign has its roots in Soviet-era attempts to discredit Ukraine’s independence movement through associations with collaborationism in World War II. It reached new lows in 2014, when Putin attempted to legitimize the occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and Donbas.
Moscow’s efforts to portray Ukraine as a Nazi state have intensified since the full-scale invasion began three years ago, with references to “Nazi Ukraine” skyrocketing in Kremlin-controlled Russian media. In this increasingly volatile environment, few were surprised when Putin declared that one of his two main war aims was the “denazification” of Ukraine.
It has since become abundantly clear that Putin’s frequent talk of “denazification” is in fact Kremlin code for “de-Ukrainization.” In other words, the ultimate goal of Russia’s current invasion is to create a Ukraine without Ukrainians, using the false accusations of Nazism as a convenient pretext to justify the destruction of the Ukrainian state and nation.
The history of nationalist politics in independent Ukraine is far from the Kremlin’s fascist fantasies. In reality, Ukraine’s far-right parties have never come close to political power and typically receive far fewer votes than nationalist candidates in most other European countries.
When Ukraine’s disillusioned and marginalized nationalists united into a single bloc in the country’s last pre-war parliamentary elections in 2019, they managed to win a paltry 2.16 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the landslide victory of Russian-language Jewish comedian Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine’s presidential election that same year further underscored the absurdity of Russia’s entire “Nazi Ukraine” narrative.
Since Zelensky’s election, Russian officials have been at odds trying to explain how a supposedly Nazi state could elect a Jewish leader. In one particularly infamous incident, during a spring 2022 interview with the Italian TV show Zona Bianca, Foreign Minister Lavrov responded to a question about Zelensky’s Jewish heritage by claiming that Adolf Hitler “also had Jewish blood.”
Lavrov’s latest comments do not indicate a significant shift in the Kremlin’s stance toward the U.S. and should not be overstated. However, it is always worth paying attention when Russia plays the Nazi card. In this case, the decision to target the Nazi slur at Trump personally, comparing one of his key policy messages to Hitler’s propaganda, indicates a degree of anxiety in Moscow about what the Kremlin might expect from the new U.S. administration.
If Trump follows through on his threats and pushes Putin toward peace talks, that anxiety could soon give way to open hostility. At that point, we can expect to see even more blatant accusations of Russian Nazism, this time aimed at the United States. That is, after all, how the Kremlin propaganda machine works. Putin claims to honor the memory of World War II, but he has done more than anyone to distort the conflict’s legacy for his own political gain.
Peter Dickinson is editor of the Atlantic Council's UkraineAlert service.
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