One of the largest fictions of the Western press after the Russian Federation launched their Special Military Operation in February 2022 is that claims of Nazis in Ukraine are exaggerated by the Russian Federation.
Screenshots of Washington Post, Politico, NPR, and MSNBC headlines
We have previously touched on the Western media hypocrisy in a separate article which can be read at length below. The article does a deep dive into the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and how its growth was influenced by the Central Intelligence Agency to sow discontent within the former USSR.
In typical Western fashion, the mainstream press has been aware of this issue, covering these camps years prior to the Special Military Operation.
In the two videos above you will see children being taught how to use rifles, lectured about the history of Ukraine from the perspective of supporters of Stefan Bandera. Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is also prominent, as well are calls to destroy Russian civilization.
Cherkashin is a veteran of the fight against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine; he was wounded in combat and later came to lead Sokil, or Falcon, the youth wing of the Svoboda party. It is important, he says, to inculcate the nation’s youth with nationalist thought, so they can battle Vladimir Putin’s Russia as well as “challenges that could completely destroy” European civilization.
Among those challenges: LGBT rights, which lecturers denounce as a sign of Western decadence.
“You need to be aware of all that,” said instructor Ruslan Andreiko. “All those gender things, all those perversions of modern Bolsheviks who have come to power in Europe and now try to make all those LGBT things like gay pride parades part of the education system.”
While some youths dozed off during lectures, others paid attention. Clearly, some were receptive.
During a break in training, a teenager played a nationalist march on his guitar. It was decorated with a sticker showing white bombs hitting a mosque, under the motto,
“White Europe is Our Goal.”
Even after the Special Military Operation launched, the Western press let the Nazi problem slip out on occasion.
An unusual attempt to downplay the influence of Nazi symbology has been invoked during the current conflict raging in Eastern Ukraine. On social media, supporters of Ukraine have defended the use of these symbols under the guise of them being different than the ones used in Nazi Germany. Of course, this can easily be disproven.
We can take the Azov Battalion symbol and analyze it carefully.
Ukrainian War Crimes
In the Western press, Ukraine is framed as a defense of Western Democracy against the evil Russians. In reality though, the Ukrainian military has been committing atrocities since at least 2014.
During the on-going conflict, Ukraine has been observed several times committing atrocities against prisoners of war. We must warn our readers that the video below is incredibly graphic.
Shortly after the video was posted, Ukraine supporters took to the internet to claim the video was another example of Russian propaganda.
The Human Rights Watch organization also chimed in, indicating that it would be a war crime if the video turned out to be real. The New York Times eventually admitted the video was real.
A common scene on social media are pro-Ukraine supporters taking pleasure in the brutality of war. The barbarism on display is illustrated by a verified Twitter user with over 200,000 followers gleefully bragging about turning bad “ordinary Russian” into a good one (Dead one).
The attempts to downplay the Nazism in Ukraine is irresponsible and will cause unneeded death and destruction as nationalists are allowed to go unchecked.
One of the reasons we at Red Street use Western sources is to refute attempts to frame our work as Russian propaganda. This strategic method of reporting is to help our readers to think about how narratives shift according to geopolitical interests.
