Since the Maidan uprising and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Kremlin propaganda has consistently portrayed Ukrainian leaders as Nazis or fascists. Russian officials and state media began claiming that the new Ukrainian leadership consists of “neo-Nazis” who allegedly threaten the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine. Russia also accused the Ukrainian authorities of “genocide” of the population of Donbas.

On 24 February 2022, while announcing the full-scale invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine was presented as the primary goal of the war. On the ground, there is no evidence to support Moscow’s accusations: nobody has ever documented a “genocide” against ethnic Russians or Russian speakers, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere. As for the Ukrainian far-right, its political influence remains minimal: in the 2019 parliamentary elections, the main ultra-nationalist parties, running together on a joint list, received just over 2% of the vote, well below the threshold required to enter Parliament. In short, the image of a “Nazi regime” in Kyiv is based on a glaring mismatch between rhetoric and reality.

However, the goal of this analysis is not to demonstrate that Russian propaganda is, in fact, propaganda. Rather, it is to understand why the Russian authorities repeatedly invoke references to the Second World War—or, in Russian parlance, the “Great Patriotic War”—when speaking about Ukraine. Understanding this memory dynamic is essential to grasp the power of a rhetoric which, despite lacking any factual basis, continues to shape the Russian worldview.

Erasing Soviet complicity in World War II

The Soviet and Russian insistence on using the term “Great Patriotic War” to refer exclusively to the period from 1941 to 1945 serves a specific purpose: to erase the twenty-one months that preceded Nazi Germany’s invasion of the USSR. Between the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, and Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, Moscow and Berlin were de facto allies: they engaged in extensive economic cooperation, diplomatic coordination, jointly invaded and partitioned Poland in September 1939, and the Soviet Union proceeded to annex the Baltic countries and wage war against Finland. By reducing the war to the period 1941–1945, the USSR and Russia were able to deny any responsibility for the outbreak of the Second World War and present themselves solely as the victim of Nazi aggression and the primary liberator of Europe.

The Great Patriotic War—and especially the victory in 1945—became the founding event of Soviet history and the cornerstone of collective memory. Yet this memory, often portrayed as monolithic and universally shared, is anything but uniform. A Ukrainian from the west, who endured two successive occupations between 1939 and 1944, remembers a war very different from that of an eastern Ukrainian, whose experience was shaped primarily by Nazi destruction. The memory of a Russian bears little resemblance to that of a Crimean Tatar, who was deported along with his entire community and denied the right of return for decades. As for Soviet Jews, whose families and communities were annihilated in the Holocaust, they were long forced to remain silent—official narratives left no room for the specificity of their suffering.

While in Western Europe and North America the Holocaust has come to be understood as the ultimate measure of wartime horror, the Soviet myth of war erases this tragedy by subsuming it within the vast death toll of the Soviet people as a whole. Minority memories—of anti-Jewish massacres, ethnic deportations, or the varied experience of occupation—had to be absorbed, silenced, and effaced.

The collective experience of the war and the official discourse surrounding it deeply reshaped the Soviet population’s understanding of “fascism” and “anti-fascism.” Rather than referring to a specific political doctrine of the inter-war period, the term “fascism” had become a catch-all label for the ultimate enemy. Trotsky or the British Conservatives could just as easily be branded as “fascists”, as well as domestic and international opponents after 1945—including even the Chinese Communists. The word “Nazi” itself was rarely used. In everyday life, calling someone a “fascist” served more as the gravest possible insult rather than as a statement of ideological substance.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as faith in communism as a project for the future began to wane, the cult of the 1945 victory gradually became the main pillar of the Soviet regime’s legitimacy. Commemorations became ritualised and came to involve all generations and social groups: children, neatly lined up, marched in front of the Eternal Flame or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; brides, veils flowing and bouquets in hand, visited war memorials to lay flowers and pose. In every city—and eventually in every town and village—the state-built memorial complexes whose solemn architecture was intended to inscribe the memory of the Great Patriotic War into the everyday life of its citizens.

The Putin Era: memory as a weapon

Under Vladimir Putin, the cult of the Great Patriotic War has been revived. Following the pro-democracy protests of 2011 and Putin’s bid for a third presidential term in 2012, the regime instituted a deliberate policy of historical narrative construction, aimed at grounding its legitimacy in a vision of the nation as under siege. Faced with widespread protests against growing authoritarianism, the authorities chose to portray Russia as surrounded by enemies—and Putin as the only bulwark capable of defending the homeland. There was no need to invent a new ideology: the already well-established myth of the Great Patriotic War naturally emerged as the regime’s strategic narrative, functioning on every level.

The glorification of the 1945 victory allowed the regime to purge the collective memory of its specifically socialist elements: by retaining only the narrative of national triumph, the Soviet period could be seamlessly integrated into a continuous national history without any revolutionary rupture. At the same time, the rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin as a legitimate victor served to validate autocracy. The mass repressions and genocidal policies that claimed millions of lives were reframed as a tragic but necessary step: they had made the USSR a global superpower, capable of defending civilisation against the “brown plague.”

The Kremlin has multiplied its legal instruments to enforce this narrative. Since 2020, the Russian Constitution mandates “respect for the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland” and prohibits “diminishing the importance of the heroism” of the Soviet people. In April 2021, Putin signed a law increasing penalties for “insults” or “false claims” about the Second World War and its veterans. In December 2019, Putin himself gathered some leaders of post-Soviet states around a pile of archival documents that he said proved historical truths long ignored in the West—selectively quoting them to justify, in retrospect, the USSR’s annexation of Poland and the Baltic states. In this way, Putin has weaponised history, which has become inseparable from national interest. To challenge his interpretation is tantamount to treason.

The national imagination built around the cult of the Great Patriotic War now allows all of Russia’s actions on the international stage to be framed as part of an eternal war against fascism. Within Russian media discourse, it would have been unthinkable to describe the Ukrainian government as a “fascist junta” or a “Nazi clique” outside the narrative framework imposed by the state over the past decade. The 2022 full-scale invasion is thus portrayed merely as a continuation of the Great Patriotic War: a conflict embedded in a cyclical conception of time in which Russia, eternally under threat from a Western enemy, fights for its very survival—on Ukrainian soil.

9, Russians march in the Immortal Regiment carrying portraits of relatives who fought between 1941 and 1945. Increasingly, the faces of those who fought—or died—in the war against Ukraine are added to these ranks, as though both wars were part of a single, endless struggle. Past and present warfare are merged, and the victory of 1945 becomes the lens through which all events—past, present, and future—are interpreted in a continuous historical timeline.

This symbolic fusion also explains the surreal images of Russian occupation forces who, in recent weeks, have placed propaganda banners in destroyed Ukrainian cities. An uninhabitable Bakhmut was transformed into a stage for celebrating the 80^th anniversary of Russia’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War.” The cult of victory is not only a central element of the Putinist imaginary—it functions as an operating system for domestic governance and external aggression.

Russie 🇷🇺

Au milieu des ruines de la ville Ukrainienne de Bakhmut, les forces Russes ont placardé des affiches pour fêter les 80 ans du Jour de la Victoire de l'URSS sur l'Allemagne Hitlérienne. pic.twitter.com/dscG6c17QH

— Cartes du Monde (@CartesDuMonde) April 29, 2025

Expanding the war narrative: from Ukraine to Europe

This mythological framework also shapes Moscow’s foreign policy. It fuels the belief in a moral right to “punish” people accused of collaborating with the enemy; the war narrative becomes a disciplinary tool used against “rebellious” neighbouring countries. A telling example of this is the installation of a giant screen on the Estonian border, broadcasting Victory Day celebrations in a loop—an attempt to remind Estonians, as well as Latvians and Lithuanians, that the Soviet victory represents an unassailable moral superiority. Identifying with the discourse of the Great Patriotic War thus becomes a mark of loyalty and virtue; to reject or question it is to prove one’s treachery, to expose oneself as corrupted by the enemy, and therefore to be branded a fascist. Through this mechanism, the Russian regime does more than control collective memory—it controls the political and social sphere.

In the Russian collective imagination, the word “fascism” has lost all connection with a specific political ideology and now refers only to an abstract, absolute threat: the desire to destroy Russia. It has become synonymous with “enemy” or “Russophobe,” always denoting the Other, never a historically defined movement. This separation between word and meaning allows the regime to simultaneously glorify the antifascist victory and openly promote xenophobic, homophobic, or ultraconservative rhetoric, without any perceived contradiction.

The word “denazification,” used by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, to justify the invasion, initially puzzled many Russians, most of whom were unfamiliar with the term in this context. Shortly afterwards, the state news agency RIA Novosti published an article by Timofey Sergeytsev – What Russia Should Do with Ukraine – aimed at clarifying its meaning: “denazification” was described as a “total cleansing,” targeting not only alleged Nazi leaders but also “the popular masses who are passive Nazis,” deemed guilty of having supported the “Nazi government.” According to Sergeytsev, modern Ukraine hides its Nazism behind aspirations for “independence” and “European development.” To destroy this Nazism, he argues, is to “de-Europeanise” Ukraine. In this logic, denazification becomes synonymous with eliminating all Western influence from Ukraine and dismantling the country’s existence as a nation-state and a distinct society. Incubated on official state platforms, this narrative reveals the true scope of “denazification”: a large-scale project aimed at erasing any trace of Ukrainian singularity, a blueprint for the genocide.

The article recently published on the official website of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), entitled “Eurofascism, Today as 80 Years Ago, Is a Common Enemy of Moscow and Washington,” strikingly illustrates the expansion of the “denazification” discourse far beyond Ukraine. The accompanying image depicts a grotesque hybrid monster: its body is shaped like a black swastika with the EU’s circle of stars in the centre, while its head is a caricature of Ursula von der Leyen. The creature, with its blood-stained claws outstretched, is caught between two bayonets—one American, the other Russian/Soviet. This grotesque image is not merely a provocation: it reflects a narrative deeply entrenched in Russian state propaganda, where “Eurofascism” becomes an operational concept encompassing all European societies.

Russian intelligence: 'Eurofascism' is the common enemy of Russia and the US. The drawing says it all. Russia is now using the same language against EU that it used to justify its attack on Ukraine. Sure, let's do business with this country again and try not to provoke it. pic.twitter.com/FzXi1hmmZl

— Janis Kluge (@jakluge) April 17, 2025

Such a message, endorsed by the highest levels of the state, might have seemed absurd or even comical just a few years ago—much like the rhetoric around “Ukronazis,” which even Russian opposition figures failed to take seriously, dismissing it as a cynical smokescreen. But the 2022 tipping point revealed these discourses for what they truly are: the ideological foundation of a large-scale invasion, long prepared within the informational sphere. Today, part of European society—especially elements of the pacifist left—is falling into the same trap: underestimating or ignoring the ongoing propaganda dynamic. But the machine is already in motion. The language of fascism is being broadened daily to include new designated enemies, and the ideological war is shifting: it is no longer stopping at Ukraine—it is now targeting all of Europe. In the face of this brutal reconfiguration of the official Russian narrative, complacency or passivity have themselves become forms of strategic blindness.

Hanna Perekhoda

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