"Coward Nazism": How the invasion of Ukraine shattered the myth of Vladimir Putin's coolness

Yuri Maznychenko 11 March 2022

The war unleashed by Russia on the territory of Ukraine has already received an objective and unanimous assessment by the international community. The military invasion of Vladimir Putin's regime has been condemned by all democratic countries, all well-known global corporations and brands have refused to cooperate with the aggressor country, and Russian nationality has become a stigma for all civilization.

Today millions of people on the planet consider the perennial Russian dictator an heir of Adolf Hitler, who tried to bring the entire world to its knees and establish a new order in it with the help of World War II. The purity of the Aryan race, the Jewish question - the Führer was insane, and his outlook on life was largely the result of a severely disturbed psyche.

The National Socialists in the 1920s and 1930s took advantage of the revanchist sentiments of Germans who had lost in World War I and were impoverished in the Great Depression, and, seizing power and sowing general fear, launched a flywheel of terror that subsequently took the lives of 70 million people around the globe.

The Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1946 resulted in four charges against German National Socialists: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and conspiracy to commit criminal acts. Nazi leaders and their collaborators were sentenced to executions and years of imprisonment.

"Never Again"- witnesses who survived the horrors of that war did their best to raise future generations on a foundation of humanity and tolerance for dissent.

But 77 years after the end of the world-wide military catastrophe, it turns out that Nazism was not completely eradicated by the decisions of the international military tribunal at Nuremberg. It emerged and gained strength again in Russia, a country that was part of the Soviet Union, fought the invasion of Hitler's troops and lost the greatest number of lives in those tragic years. World War II veterans would surely roll over in their coffins if they knew that Russia would go to war on Ukraine and that the current generations of Russians would participate in the extermination of the Ukrainian people.

Except that Russian Nazism is not like the German one. Even before the war, Hitler conquered the minds of Germans by pointing out directly the enemies of Germany. And after its declaration, he explained to his army and admirers which nations had to be eradicated in order to make the country successful and the world to take on new colours. As unacceptable as the ideas of the leader of German Nazism were, he was straightforward about his own people as well as the enemies of the fatherland. He called things by their proper names: the Italian Blackshirts were allies, the Russian Communists were enemies, and the Jews had no right to live.

Russian Nazism is similar to German Nazism insofar as the degree of horror and propaganda's influence on society. And it differs in the mass replacement of concepts. Hitler demanded Alsace and Lorraine, and he got them. Russia welcomed the "return of Crimea," but in no way intended to annex it. After all, it was "the decisions of the Crimean people," who "for so long endured the criminal Kyiv government and the Bandera nationalists, and now are happy to return to their native Russian harbour".

Hitler needed Czechoslovakia's power for the war, and under the collective silence of Western countries, he got hold of it. For 8 years Russia has denied participating in the operation to create the "DPR" and "LPR" in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and militarily feed the gunmen to resist Ukraine by removing all capacity of any value from Ukrainian enterprises.

Russian Nazism will go down in world history as a "coward" attempting to achieve its goals stealthily. Putin's Nazism is not an open war for an idea. It is about undeclared military actions and sabotage operations to harm "Russia's enemies," which could be proudly talked about from the TV screens. These are FSS methods, the stench of which can be smelled a miles away.

And if something went wrong, one could always ban the Internet and any alternative sources of information to tell about "ethnically oriented biological weapons, which are being developed in Ukraine with the assistance of the United States and are carried by birds".

There are a lot of people in Russia who are ready to believe any ridiculous idea of Putin's regime and openly support it. All of them are heirs to the great victory in the battle for the motherland, accustomed to living under "regular threats" from NATO, and on May 9 they wear St. George ribbons and cling to their vehicles such patriotic "To Berlin" or "We can repeat".

They firmly believe in the greatness of their nation, even if their last savings spent on vodka, and the water in the house will be turned on only next week. And they are terribly happy to hear the government's news about successes in the fight against the "rotting West," because no one has yet invented a cure for human envy.

There are also many apolitical people in Russia who do not support Putin and his decision to invade Ukraine. Right now, many Russians are advocating against the war. But they did not have the courage to do anything that Ukrainian society did in 2014, when it opposed the criminal decisions of the previous government and stood up for European democratic values.

You can bury your head in the sand, but this will not stop Russians with anti-war sentiments from being aids to scintillating Nazism, because the possibility of a change of power is their constitutional right. A passive observer is just as much an accomplice to the crime without trying to stop it.

Russia's war crimes in Ukraine can no longer be counted even on the fingers of Russian soldiers killed in this illegal invasion. The vacuum bombing of Kharkiv, the use of shrapnel bombs from the Iskander missile system banned by the UN convention, the artillery strikes on residential buildings and the killing of civilians, the violation of agreements on "green corridors" and the firing on them, the artificial creation of a humanitarian disaster of settlements in order to show the Russian army and its humanitarian cargoes in a positive light, the bombing of a functioning maternity hospital in Mariupol, the attempt to draw the people of Belarus into the war against Ukraine through military provocation - these are just blatant points of Russian "coward" Nazism in the 16-day war on Ukraine. If we compare all of this to the charges against the German Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials, it is clear that a similar fate awaits the leaders of Putin's Nazism at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

Russians used to so enjoy walking around the accessible resorts of Turkey and Egypt wearing T-shirts with the inscription "Most Polite President," emphasizing the awesomeness of their ruler in dealing with international issues. But now there is no taking off for the vacation at sea, given the closed skies for Russian planes, and no one is intimidated by the print because no one but the Russians themselves believe in Putin's status as a peacemaker anymore.

It was unexpectedly taken away by the incumbent President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who by his willful decision to defend his country from the second army of the world has received the absolute support of the Ukrainian people and is now an object of capture by people from all over the globe.

Putin's coward Nazism is nothing more than a carefully thought-out plan to keep Russia in power so that he and his henchmen can continue to dispose of the resources of the largest country in the world in their own way. For this purpose, he needs victories in the international arena - the annexation of Crimea, the creation of the "DPR" and "LPR", as well as the so-called "special operation" in Ukraine to "denazify" and "demilitarize" a neighbor who dares to look in the direction of development of civilized countries. So that the Russian people, despite their poverty, would rejoice in the supposed greatness of the nation.

Ukraine is doing all it can to oppose this evil in its own land and not to allow it to make its expansion into the West. How long this plague will continue to walk the wide expanses from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok depends only on the Russians themselves.