Here’s how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe
If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn’t make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.
If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.
We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs
You’re right that the Ukrainian military is filled with Nazis (this doesn’t mean all of them or a majority are consciously, but it does seem to be getting difficult to deny that now given the amount of evidence, at least when not of Ukrainian kids just pulled of the street).
However the idea that there is not a far-right presence in the Russian military is also not very believable, not least because we are still talking about a military state of a quite right-wing, nationalist, capitalist country. This in no way makes it equivalent to Ukraine however, because in Ukraine it appears to be far more integrated at every level of the military and state to be point where it appears like ultra-nationalism, bleeding into fascism, are the status-quo ideology.
Leaving aside the difference between “far right presence in the Russian military” and “explicit, patch-wearing, self-identifying neo nazis directly in leadership positions all over the Ukrainian state and military”, this is the point I am making. Whether there are right wingers in militaries isn’t even worth discussing - the answer is yes. Russia doesn’t have nazi units, they don’t have nazis in charge, they haven’t been doing pogroms for eight years, and to try to equate that with Ukraine is just outright wrong.
Yes I agree.