Putin’s propagandists explain the new meaning of Nazism and have nothing to do with the Jews

The Kremlin’s favorite propaganda slogan wants you to ignore the Holocaust and forget all about the 6 million Jews who died in Nazi concentration camps. They are rewriting history to assert that Nazism has nothing to do with the Jews.

In fact, according to state television, modern-day Nazis are not so much anti-Russian, but anti-Russian, which means Russians are new Jews or something like that. And that the fake “denuclearization” – which Vladimir Putin wants us to believe he is doing in Ukraine – is all about helping Ukraine escape the scourge of neo-Nazis.

Putin himself was forced to apologize to Israel this week after his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov – who was asked about Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in an interview – claimed Adolf Hitler also “had lines Jewish blood”.

But the propagandists on state television, which had become a cauldron of rage and historic victims during the two-month war in Ukraine, did not give up. On Thursday, on Vladimir Solovyov’s nightly show on Rossiya-1, a guest explained the new definition of Nazism.

“Nazi does not necessarily mean anti-Semitism, as Americans continue to concoct. It could be anti-Slavic, anti-Russian,” said Solovyov, a sanctioned Kremlin propagandist who had two villas on Italy’s Lake Como confiscated.

“Of course,” replied political scientist Elena Ponomareva. “Today, we are witnessing significant steps towards the revival of a global Nazi project. And why is this a Global Nazi project? Because Ukraine is where this renaissance began, but not without the support of Britain, the United States, the European Union, etc.”

Twisting the definition a bit further, Ponomareva described a process of “anti-Semitism not only against the Russians but against anything that is connected with Russia” —with Ukraine being the breeding ground for a The new “Orc” army consisting of members of the Azov Regiment fought against the finish at Mariupol’s Azovstal steel mill.

The debate over the meaning of Nazism was not just a sideshow for Kremlin thinkers. Since sending his troops in tanks and trucks into Ukraine wearing Swastika-style “Z” insignias, Putin’s assertions of political control inside Russia have escaped his textbooks. Fascism. Those who are not with us must turn against us, that is the chorus — and since we are fighting the Nazis, our enemies must also be considered the Nazis.

Kamil Galeev, a Russian historian and fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center Whose Twitter thread became a must-read during the conflict, saying that for Putin propagandists, the term Nazi was “first and foremost a racial or cultural traitor who may be Russian but refuse” – what is sometimes called “vyrus” or Russians who hate Russian.