President Vladimir Putin stunned much of the West when he offered his supposed justification for launching a “special military operation” in Ukraine: The country is run by Nazis, he said. “We will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians,” Putin explained in a nationally televised speech on February 24.
Near the end of his speech, he directly appealed to the Ukrainian military, “Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today’s neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine.” Similarly, when “Good Morning America” Host George Stephanopoulos challenged Russian Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov for describing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a puppet of the Ukrainian Nazi movement, Lavrov replied, “I think the Nazis and neo-Nazis manipulate him, otherwise it is hard to account for how President Zelensky can preside … over a society where neo-Nazism is rife.”
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