Authors

Discussion

The Russian government use and abuse the victory in World War II during the ongoing war against Ukraine. Great Patriotic War is considered the main, heroic and unifying event in the history of Russia. Therefore, to justify the aggression, the President of Russia calls Ukraine a Nazi state. Vladimir Putin called the Ukrainian authorities "a gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis." During the war, he repeatedly said that Russia was at war with neo-Nazis, that neo-Nazis were being glorified in Ukraine and that they allowed torch-light marches of many thousands. Russian propaganda calls Ukrainians Nazis and presents the aggression against Ukraine as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War.

The presentation refutes that Ukraine is a Nazi state. Nationalist parties in Ukraine do not have mass support in elections, Ukrainian legislation prohibits propaganda of Nazism and does not consider World War II collaborators as heroes and fighters for independence. At the same time, some dangerous trends in Ukrainian society related to the normalisation of Nazi collaborationism are analysed. Firstly, it is the demonstrative silence of the President of Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance on the "Hunka case" - the scandal with the invitation to the Canadian Parliament for President Zelensky's speech of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) warrior Yaroslav Hunka. Although Ukraine does not consider the soldiers of this division to be fighters for independence, some politicians and public intellectuals have supported the glorification of these soldiers as fighters against the "eternal" enemy - Russia. Solomiia Bobrovska, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, called Hunka "a living fighter against Ruscism." The second argument in favour of normalisation of collaborationism is the photograph with SS Galician soldiers and Ukrainian soldiers of ongoing war at the “In Storms of Steel” exhibition at the Museum of History in Kyiv. Finally, the term "collaborationism" was removed from Ukrainian history textbooks. These dangerous trends need feedback from the Ukrainian government.