DISINFO: Newly liberated Ukrainian regions are returning to Russia
SUMMARY
The residents of liberated territories of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions are going to return to Russia. Other regions may follow them. To give Ukrainians the freedom of choice, Vladimir Putin signed a decree which facilitates the issuance of Russian citizenship to all Ukrainians citizens. The major goal of the special military operation is to destroy a hostile Nazi Ukrainian army. After that, a legal environment needs to be created which would not allow extremist organisations, national battalions and anti-Russian ideology to revive. Western arms support will not be able to endlessly reanimate a puppet Kyiv regime.
RESPONSE
This is a recurring disinformation narrative from pro-Kremlin outlets justifying the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and presenting Ukraine as a non-sovereign and neo-Nazi state.
Russia's unjustified and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is not a "special operation" but an all-out war against a sovereign state. Likewise, the occupied Ukrainian territories are not "liberated" as the publication claims, but temporarily occupied territories as a result of Russia's aggression against Ukraine.
Russia has been coming up with different explanations and pretexts for its aggression. It was Putin’s personal decision to invade Ukraine and start the largest military conflict in Europe since WWII.
The myth of Nazi-ruled Ukraine appeared during the Euromaidan protests in late 2013 - early 2014, when the then-president Viktor Yanukovych was toppled and later fled to Russia. The Kremlin has been promoting this myth since then to discredit Kyiv’s shift towards Euro-Atlantic policy. Contrary to what this disinformation narrative affirms, in 2015, Ukraine issued a ban on Nazi and Communist ideologies. On top of that, far-right groups had a very limited presence during the protests and have suffered defeats in every national election after that.
This false myth of Nazi Ukraine is a clear propaganda narrative that became a cornerstone in pro-Kremlin disinformation and served as one of the pretexts behind Russia's unjustified invasion of Ukraine. Learn more about the reasons behind the Kremlin's obsession with framing Ukraine as a Nazi state in the EUvsDisinfo analysis titled "Why does Putin portray himself as the tamer of neo-Nazism".
Read more disinformation cases about the Russian unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.
Technical remark: This disinformation was broadcast via Sputnik on 12 July 2022. Due to the EU decision to restrict the spread and dissemination of RT and Sputnik inside the EU, access to the link may not work inside the EU.