DISINFO: Nazi Ukraine kills Russian speakers in East and wants to set up monoethnic state
SUMMARY
Ukrainian authorities are killing Russian-speaking people in the east and the south of the country by shelling the cities there and employing volunteers recruited in these areas. The lack of Russians will help the Nazi regime to build a nationalist monoethnic state with a particular ideology. They need territories without the Russian-speaking population.
RESPONSE
This is a recurring disinformation narrative from pro-Kremlin outlets accusing Ukraine’s leadership of Nazism. This claim was made to justify Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.
In reality, Ukraine is a multinational country with ethnic Russians comprising 17.3 per cent of the entire population. According to a recent research, 18 per cent of Ukrainian citizens speak Russian in everyday life, mostly in the East and the South. The fact that Russian can be heard among Ukrainian servicemen on the frontline more often than elsewhere in Ukraine can be explained by a big number of local residents who join the army as volunteers and enroll in local militias of their own free will. It has nothing to do with ethnic cleansing, as Russian propagandists often claim.
There are also tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who are ethnic Crimean Tatars, Jews, Hungarians, Romanians, Greeks and Bulgarians, Roma and others. Many of them speak their respective languages, Ukrainian and Russian.
Ukraine is not a Nazi country and its leaders do not intent to build a monoethnic state. Neither ethnic minorities nor Russian-speaking Ukrainians are persecuted in Ukraine. President Vladimir Zelensky was brought up in a Russian-speaking family. Ukrainian law does not forbid the use of Russian nor any other languages in private communication and religious ceremonies, as well as in book publishing, the press, including radio and television, education and the service sector. Furthermore, Ukraine is a signatory to the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, which guarantees that people in Ukraine have the right: "to use freely and without interference his or her minority language, in private and in public, orally and in writing". It is Russia's ideology that can rather be referred to as Nazism, as is seen from the aforementioned article.
The myth of Nazi-ruled Ukraine, which appeared during the Revolution of Dignity (Euromaidan) protests in late 2013 - early 2014, has been used by the Kremlin to discredit Kyiv’s shift toward Euro-Atlantic policy. It has also been widely debunked and analysed by EUvsDisinfo.
Read more disinformation cases alleging that Ukraine is a Russophobic Nazi state.