End of Ukrainian identity
Destruction of Ukraine: What Moscow understands by denazification
By Klaus Wedekind
04/06/2022, 09:49 am
A Russian agency report gives a chilling glimpse into Kremlin propaganda of a necessary “denazification” of Ukraine. He shows that not only the government and elites are meant, but the entire population, and that atrocities like the one in Bucha are a sinister consequence.
The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti has one contribution published, in which author Timofey Sergeytsev writes how his country must “denazify” Ukraine. Officially, it’s an opinion piece, but such an article doesn’t appear in this medium without the Kremlin’s blessing. It is all the more frightening how far the propaganda goes. There is no longer just talk of “Nazis and drug addicts” oppressing the people. According to Sergeytsev, one must assume that the majority of Ukrainians have become Nazis and that the only way is to re-educate the population under the absolute control of Russia. Ultimately, one could view his article as a call for genocide.
annihilation or reeducation
The hypothesis that “the government is bad, the people are good” doesn’t work, he writes. Denazification is a set of measures taken against the Nazised population that technically cannot be directly punished as war criminals. All Ukrainians who took up arms should be “destroyed as far as possible on the battlefield”.
What the population faces in the event of a Russian victory emerges more than clearly from the following sections. The “just war” against them is being “waged as cautiously and prudently as possible,” writes Sergeytsev. According to this, the masses of the population must be subjected to “re-education”, “which is achieved through ideological suppression (suppression) of National Socialist attitudes and strict censorship: not only in the political sphere, but necessarily also in the sphere of culture and education”. So the supposed liberation is actually an erasure of Ukrainian identity.
“Sovereign Ukraine must not continue to exist”
The article goes on to say that Ukraine must not continue to exist as a sovereign state, because denazification can only be carried out under the absolute control of the victor. This should not only apply temporarily. At least one generation must be “born, grow up and mature under the conditions of denazification”.
The author twists the desire for freedom and independence on a European path to a more than 30-year development since 1989 in the direction of Nazism. Ukrainian National Socialism is not a “light version” of German National Socialism in the first half of the 20th century, but is based on “European and, in its most pronounced form, American racism”.
There can therefore be no compromise based on a formula like “NATO no, EU yes”. The West is “the designer, the source and the sponsor of Ukrainian Nazism,” Sergeytsev proclaims. “Ukronazism poses no less, but a greater threat to the world and to Russia than German National Socialism in the Hitler version.”
New People’s Republics in “Liberated Areas”
The name “Ukraine” cannot be retained for an area liberated from the “Nazi regime”, but there will be newly created people’s republics, he continues. Out of “crime and atonement” they would have to “rely on Russia in the processes of restoration, revival and development.”
There can be no neutrality for these areas, the “cadres and organizations that are the instrument of denazification in the newly denazified republics can only rely on Russia’s direct military and organizational support.” On the “liberated territory” whose borders Russia will define, Russian law and jurisdiction will apply and “a tribunal for crimes in the former Ukraine” will be set up.
Denazification inevitably means de-Ukrainization, writes Sergeytsev explicitly. The West took over from the Soviet Union the “artificial inflation of the ethnic component of the self-identification of the population in the areas of historic Little Russia and New Russia”. This must be “returned to its natural limits and robbed of its political function”.
Partition and ethnic cleansing
The goal of the invasion is said to be the division of Ukraine, including ethnic cleansing. In the eastern part, sooner or later, a majority of people would be convinced of Russia’s long-term intentions and “that they will not be abandoned,” Sergeytsev said. He does not write about annexation, but about a “territory of potential integration into Russian civilization”.
However, it is unlikely that the “Catholic province” in western Ukraine will become part of the pro-Russian areas. Instead, it would become a “compulsorily neutral and demilitarized Ukraine” to which the “Russia haters” would go. If the “rest of Ukraine” does not agree to this, they are threatened with a continuation of the “military operation”, which may require a permanent Russian military presence, writes Sergeytsev.
New Cold War
It remains to be seen how the war in Ukraine will end. What is clear, however, is that there will be a new Cold War. According to Sergeytsev, Russia is even striving for this: it must “eradicate Western totalitarianism, the imposed programs of civilizational degradation and disintegration, the mechanisms of submission to the superpower of the West and the United States,” the article says. Russia must finally bid farewell to pro-European and pro-Western illusions and see itself as the ultimate authority to protect and preserve those values of historical Europe that the West has abandoned.
Finally, to conclude the article, the author makes Russia the altruistic victim of the West – a common image in Russian propaganda. The last act was the outstretched hand, for which it received a “monstrous blow” in the 1990s. Russia has made the greatest sacrifices, all of which the West has rejected. Russia will now go its own way and no longer care about the fate of the West.
The last paragraph can be understood as a threat, but it also shows where Moscow is headed in the future. They will return to the legacy of decolonization, writes Sergeytsev, although his text is, on the contrary, a pamphlet of imperialism. Russia potentially has many partners and allies that the West has suppressed for years and who do not want to go back under its yoke. “The denazification of Ukraine is at the same time its decolonization, which the Ukrainian people must understand as they begin to free themselves from the intoxication, temptation and dependence of the so-called European election.”