– Putin said that in the speech he gave just on the morning that the invasion began a year ago, and this week he has basically said the same thing, says SVT’s former Russia correspondent Bert Sundström.
What Putin talked about is Nazism.
In the year that has passed since the beginning of the invasion, official Russian pages have maintained a large and visible presence on mostly Western social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, but also Telegram, and have returned to the Nazi theme in hundreds and hundreds of posts.
Nazi accusations and posts about Nazism during World War II may well be the single most common theme in Russian social media communication.
Hundreds of posts with the word in social media
When SVT Nyheter searches for the word “Nazi”, it turns up 140 posts published between February 24, 2022 and February 24, 2023 – just on the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Facebook page – and then follows a very long list of embassies and other authority pages on a number of different platforms that also repeated the same things.
– The hope is that at least some outside Russia will accept this description. We must also remember that when we say “we”, it is largely Western Europe. But then there is another world, Latin America and Africa, China and India, where arguments indicating that Russia is right and Ukraine wrong are readily accepted.
But the reason why Russia repeatedly repeats “Nazism” has its explanation primarily in the past.
In the video above, Bert Sundström explains the truth, and the history of why Putin and Russia have now chosen to focus so hard on Nazism.
