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I hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but Ukraine (atleast from the pictures I’m seeing) seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups. In my id

I hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but Ukraine (atleast from the pictures I’m seeing) seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups. In my ideal scenario they both take each out without effecting the actual EU.

the_mar 4y ago
Where are you seeing this? Genuinely asking because I always thought that the whole ukraine neo-nazi thing was entirely made up
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  It’s no more or less made up then the white supremacist narrative in the US. Yes they are real, yes you can fill a football stadium with them,no they are not even a noticeable percent of the population thanks to how large both counties are. This makes it easy to fill a tv screen with Nazis and sell whatever narrative you want.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  My understanding was that they do have a neo-Nazi militia that was incorporated into the official army, and they made at least some effort to clean them up a bit, after that. This happened because the militia rose up and started having significant success against the Russians in 2014 while the Ukrainian army was struggling, so there was a "the enemy of my enemy..." aspect. Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know.
  - marshray 4y ago
    > Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know. Far-right political parties only got ~2% of the votes in elections. Not enough for even a single seat in Parliament. If there still are any Nazis in Ukraine, their influence is much smaller than the far-right factions in Poland or France.
- pushkine 4y ago
  It's real, but it's only used for its anti-Russia symbolism. It's my understanding that they don't actually adhere to other parts of the ideology.
dontlaugh 4y ago
The problem with them taking each other out is the millions of innocents they’d kill along the way. The only good outcome is a peace agreement.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Unfortunately that was tried post Crimea and didn't work.
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    True, sadly the Ukranian state refused to uphold the Minsk agreements guaranteeing regional autonomy to the Donbas. Instead, they kept bombing the region.
wycy 4y ago
> Ukraine [...] seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups So is the US. Rising fascism is simply the state of the world right now. To pick the first story at the top of my feed right now: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/us/jan-6-camp-auschwitz-hoodie.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/us/jan-6-camp-auschwitz-h...
- thrown_22 4y ago
  In the US you don't have regiments with swastikas on their flags. In Ukraine you do.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    The US has the luxury of not being invaded by a country 3x as big. Ukraine doesn't really have the luxury of picking and choosing who is allowed to defend.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      Had the Nazis been purged between 2014 and today Russia would have most likely not invaded. Least we forget that during that period Nazi death squads killed more people in the break away regions than have so far died in this war. The last time US citizens were killed abroad in large numbers by the army of another country was the Alamo and we still remember it.
      - hackerlight 4y ago
        No, your first sentence presumes that the Kremlin propaganda is truthful. Putin's ambitions have nothing to do with neo-Nazis in Ukraine, as his own writings over many years reveal. It's imperial ambition. Ukraine was smart not to get rid of Azov. Putin invaded once for made up reasons, no reason to think he won't do it again. Ukraine's understanding of fascist Russia's true self was correct.
        thrown_22 4y ago
hackerlight 4y ago
"At least from the pictures I'm seeing". There you have it folks, pictures. Ukraine with their centrist democratically elected leader and lowest amount of neo-nazism in the region compared to all their neighbors according to Pew polling is actually a fascist country justifiably being taken out by Putin's Russia, a mafia dictatorship who promotes known Nazis to high positions (such as the founder of Wagner who has SS tattoos on his neck). It's so ironic that this thread about purported Ukrainian propaganda is so thick with Kremlin propaganda.
- confidantlake 4y ago
  For real. Criticize the British monarchy on hn? Verbotin. Spread Kremlin propaganda? Just part of a "curious discussion".
pie420 4y ago
^this commenter is an example of a pro-russian troll and /or bot
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Yep, either someone pushing propaganda, or someone who has ate it all and is regurgitating it.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
If you spend a fair amount of time living in Ukraine, you're unlikely to encounter or notice Neo Nazi groups. They certainly do exist and you'll see a swastika spray-painted on abandoned buildings here and there. You can probably find and join a Neo Nazi group more easily than you could in the West, sure. But generally people don't seem to have much problem with Jews (at least publicly). Middle-aged people and older don't like homosexuals, but the younger generation is totally LGBQ-friendly, albeit not sure about 'T'. Black people aren't revered or hated- if anything they're so rare that they're either a subject of curiosity or ignored when walking by on the street. WW2 never left the public consciousness. Older people remember cowering from Nazis and seniors remember fighting them. It's not "overrun" with Neo Nazi groups. Ya they exist though, but they don't seem to have much sway if any at all.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Antisemitism is significantly higher in Russia than Ukraine according to polling.
egeozcan 4y ago
Where do you see those pictures? I follow some pro-Russian propaganda groups on Telegram just to see the other side of the argument and even they don't seem to have such pictures. A small side-story: In one of those groups I told them I am Turkish (as they really kindly asked the non-Russians following the group to state their reasons for doing so) and out of nowhere they went 15 mins about how disgusting my race is and when I asked how is that different than the behavior of alleged nazis in Ukraine, they banned me :)
- bergenty 4y ago
  A lot of them on Reddit, they even go through the trouble of censoring the flags before they post them.
  - egeozcan 4y ago
    I'm not a reddit aficionado so I googled "reddit ukraine", which landed me on "r/ukraine" and I went through the first page. The only nazi-like symbol is worn by a bear depicted as a caricature of Russia, on this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xfqauu/go_away_russia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xfqauu/go_away_rus... How do I see "a lot of them"?
    - cbHXBY1D 4y ago
      Search "Nazi patch Ukraine" or some variation on Twitter. I'm not exaggerating when I say that there's hundreds of examples - many of them posted by the BBC, Reuters, or Zelensky himself.
      - egeozcan 4y ago
        A lot of them are taken out of context see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhg8AXXHoRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhg8AXXHoRE I did find some photos of supposedly nazi-symbol-wearing Ukrainian solders but I didn't recognize the symbol before reading the explanation, maybe they didn't too? Also, I found some photos of Russian soldiers wearing such symbols too: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-fighter-neo-nazi-symbols-medal-kill-ukraine-nationalist-2022-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-fighter-neo-nazi-symb...
poizan42 4y ago
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
- tut-urut-utut 4y ago
  > 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.
  - poizan42 4y ago
    > 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-lavrov/russian-has-not-been-banned-ukraine-despite-repeat/ 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.
    - pushkine 4y ago
      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#Analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#Ana...
dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
> I hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but I'm not saying you are one, but this opening "I hate Putin/Russia/etc. but..." is typical opening line of Kremlin trolls.

the_mar 4y ago

Where are you seeing this? Genuinely asking because I always thought that the whole ukraine neo-nazi thing was entirely made up

the_lonely_road 4y ago
It’s no more or less made up then the white supremacist narrative in the US. Yes they are real, yes you can fill a football stadium with them,no they are not even a noticeable percent of the population thanks to how large both counties are. This makes it easy to fill a tv screen with Nazis and sell whatever narrative you want.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yamtaddle 4y ago
My understanding was that they do have a neo-Nazi militia that was incorporated into the official army, and they made at least some effort to clean them up a bit, after that. This happened because the militia rose up and started having significant success against the Russians in 2014 while the Ukrainian army was struggling, so there was a "the enemy of my enemy..." aspect. Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know.
- marshray 4y ago
  > Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know. Far-right political parties only got ~2% of the votes in elections. Not enough for even a single seat in Parliament. If there still are any Nazis in Ukraine, their influence is much smaller than the far-right factions in Poland or France.
pushkine 4y ago
It's real, but it's only used for its anti-Russia symbolism. It's my understanding that they don't actually adhere to other parts of the ideology.

dontlaugh 4y ago

The problem with them taking each other out is the millions of innocents they’d kill along the way. The only good outcome is a peace agreement.

disgruntledphd2 4y ago
Unfortunately that was tried post Crimea and didn't work.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  True, sadly the Ukranian state refused to uphold the Minsk agreements guaranteeing regional autonomy to the Donbas. Instead, they kept bombing the region.

wycy 4y ago

> Ukraine [...] seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups So is the US. Rising fascism is simply the state of the world right now. To pick the first story at the top of my feed right now: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/us/jan-6-camp-auschwitz-hoodie.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/us/jan-6-camp-auschwitz-h...

thrown_22 4y ago
In the US you don't have regiments with swastikas on their flags. In Ukraine you do.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  The US has the luxury of not being invaded by a country 3x as big. Ukraine doesn't really have the luxury of picking and choosing who is allowed to defend.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Had the Nazis been purged between 2014 and today Russia would have most likely not invaded. Least we forget that during that period Nazi death squads killed more people in the break away regions than have so far died in this war. The last time US citizens were killed abroad in large numbers by the army of another country was the Alamo and we still remember it.
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      No, your first sentence presumes that the Kremlin propaganda is truthful. Putin's ambitions have nothing to do with neo-Nazis in Ukraine, as his own writings over many years reveal. It's imperial ambition. Ukraine was smart not to get rid of Azov. Putin invaded once for made up reasons, no reason to think he won't do it again. Ukraine's understanding of fascist Russia's true self was correct.
      - thrown_22 4y ago

hackerlight 4y ago

"At least from the pictures I'm seeing". There you have it folks, pictures. Ukraine with their centrist democratically elected leader and lowest amount of neo-nazism in the region compared to all their neighbors according to Pew polling is actually a fascist country justifiably being taken out by Putin's Russia, a mafia dictatorship who promotes known Nazis to high positions (such as the founder of Wagner who has SS tattoos on his neck). It's so ironic that this thread about purported Ukrainian propaganda is so thick with Kremlin propaganda.

confidantlake 4y ago
For real. Criticize the British monarchy on hn? Verbotin. Spread Kremlin propaganda? Just part of a "curious discussion".

pie420 4y ago

^this commenter is an example of a pro-russian troll and /or bot

lamontcg 4y ago
Yep, either someone pushing propaganda, or someone who has ate it all and is regurgitating it.

unsupp0rted 4y ago

If you spend a fair amount of time living in Ukraine, you're unlikely to encounter or notice Neo Nazi groups. They certainly do exist and you'll see a swastika spray-painted on abandoned buildings here and there. You can probably find and join a Neo Nazi group more easily than you could in the West, sure. But generally people don't seem to have much problem with Jews (at least publicly). Middle-aged people and older don't like homosexuals, but the younger generation is totally LGBQ-friendly, albeit not sure about 'T'. Black people aren't revered or hated- if anything they're so rare that they're either a subject of curiosity or ignored when walking by on the street. WW2 never left the public consciousness. Older people remember cowering from Nazis and seniors remember fighting them. It's not "overrun" with Neo Nazi groups. Ya they exist though, but they don't seem to have much sway if any at all.

hackerlight 4y ago
Antisemitism is significantly higher in Russia than Ukraine according to polling.

egeozcan 4y ago

Where do you see those pictures? I follow some pro-Russian propaganda groups on Telegram just to see the other side of the argument and even they don't seem to have such pictures. A small side-story: In one of those groups I told them I am Turkish (as they really kindly asked the non-Russians following the group to state their reasons for doing so) and out of nowhere they went 15 mins about how disgusting my race is and when I asked how is that different than the behavior of alleged nazis in Ukraine, they banned me :)

bergenty 4y ago
A lot of them on Reddit, they even go through the trouble of censoring the flags before they post them.
- egeozcan 4y ago
  I'm not a reddit aficionado so I googled "reddit ukraine", which landed me on "r/ukraine" and I went through the first page. The only nazi-like symbol is worn by a bear depicted as a caricature of Russia, on this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xfqauu/go_away_russia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xfqauu/go_away_rus... How do I see "a lot of them"?
  - cbHXBY1D 4y ago
    Search "Nazi patch Ukraine" or some variation on Twitter. I'm not exaggerating when I say that there's hundreds of examples - many of them posted by the BBC, Reuters, or Zelensky himself.
    - egeozcan 4y ago
      A lot of them are taken out of context see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhg8AXXHoRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhg8AXXHoRE I did find some photos of supposedly nazi-symbol-wearing Ukrainian solders but I didn't recognize the symbol before reading the explanation, maybe they didn't too? Also, I found some photos of Russian soldiers wearing such symbols too: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-fighter-neo-nazi-symbols-medal-kill-ukraine-nationalist-2022-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-fighter-neo-nazi-symb...

poizan42 4y ago

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

tut-urut-utut 4y ago
> 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.
- poizan42 4y ago
  > 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-lavrov/russian-has-not-been-banned-ukraine-despite-repeat/ 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.
  - pushkine 4y ago
    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#Analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#Ana...

dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago

> I hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but I'm not saying you are one, but this opening "I hate Putin/Russia/etc. but..." is typical opening line of Kremlin trolls.