Vladimir Putin on Friday again painted his enemies in Ukraine as 'neo-Nazis,' even though the country has a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust and who heads a Western-backed, democratically elected government.
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL -- Vladimir Putin on Friday again painted his enemies in Ukraine as "neo-Nazis," even though the country has a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust and who heads a Western-backed, democratically elected government.
The Second World War, in which the Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people, is a linchpin of Russia's national identity. In today's Russia, officials bristle at any questioning of the USSR's role. This goes back to 1941 when Ukraine, at the time part of the Soviet Union, was occupied by Nazi Germany. Some Ukrainian nationalists welcomed the Nazi occupiers, in part as a way to challenge their Soviet opponents, according to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. Historians say that, like in other countries, there was also collaboration.
"In terms of all of the sort of constituent parts of Nazism, none of that is in play in Ukraine. Territorial ambitions. State-sponsored terrorism. Rampant antisemitism. Bigotry. A dictatorship. None of those are in play. So this is just total fiction," said Jonathan Dekel-Chen, a history professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University.
Havi Dreifuss, a historian at Tel Aviv University and Yad Vashem, said the world was now dealing with both Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion, where countries or institutions were bringing forth their own interpretations of history that were damaging to the commemoration of the Holocaust. Israel came under fire from historians in 2020 after a speech by Putin and a separate video presentation at a meeting of world leaders in Jerusalem to commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which they said skewed toward his narrative and away from the historical facts.
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