On March 15, Russia’s ambassador to Thailand, Yevgeny Tomikhin, held a news conference to give Russia’s perspective on its invasion of Ukraine.
According to , journalists from Japan, the United States and other countries were not allowed to attend the event.
During his roughly hour-and-a-half talk, live-streamed by Thailand’s Bangkok Post newspaper, Tomikhin reiterated false claims about Russia’s war of aggression.
As required by Russian law, Tomikhin did not call the invasion a war, but rather a military operation. He repeated the claim that Russia does not “shell civil infrastructure” or “apartments,” disproved by a multitude of videos and deaths.
He said “a top priority” of the Russian armed forces is to avoid civilians, despite evidence suggesting the Russian military is intentionally targeting civilian areas.
Tomikhin “advised” anti-war protesters gathered outside the embassy to study “the historical background of the Russia-Ukraine crisis.” And he later claimed that Russia, as during the World War Two, is defending Europe.
"Europeans still don't understand that Russia is saving them [from] Nazism. It was done in 1945, and now we are facing another threat of Nazism in Europe,” he said.
Polygraph.info has Russia’s efforts to play up the far-right threat in Ukraine and to be engaged in the “de-nazification” of Ukraine. Russian propagandists have to warn of Holocaust-like scenarios in eastern Ukraine, where Russia launched a clandestine war in 2014.
But the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) Russia’s assertion that it is halting genocide in its war to “de-nazify” its neighbor. On Wednesday, March 18, the ICJ ruled it had not seen evidence proving Russia’s claims of genocide, and asked Russia to immediately stop its war.
the ruling.
At the same time, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions have had fascist overtones, despite his claim to be battling Nazism.
On Wednesday, March 16, Putin delivered targeting a so-called fifth column – a purported secret group looking to undermine Russia from within.
Putin said:
Putin then claimed that U.S. and European sanctions, enacted to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and speculation about Russia’s military losses are actually intended to provoke a civil conflict in Russia. The so-called “fifth columnists” are being used to reach this goal of “destroying Russia,” he said.
Commentators were quick to notice the fascist parallels.
“The language of national ‘self-purification’ that Putin invoked today is the standard vocabulary of fascism, all in the name of a war for supposed de-nazification,” Seva Gunitsky an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, said on Twitter.
Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based political analyst, "Putin in an Orwellian way has divided the citizens of Russia into clean and unclean.”
In his 2004 book, The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, :
In his , "Ur-fascism," the cultural theorist and author Umberto Eco identified a number of characteristics of fascism.
Eco noted that fascist societies view disagreement as “treason,” condemn “nonstandard sexual habits,” are obsessed with plots in which “followers must feel besieged,” and use Orwellian ‘newspeak’ to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
Russian citizens have also begun displaying the letter Z, which was marked on some Russian military vehicles at the onset of the invasion.
Videos have been posted showing young people dressed in black with the letter Z on their clothing, angrily chanting, and sometimes raising their fists in unison. Some evidence suggests participants were forced to join these rallies.
Political strategist Igor Mangushev identifies as a “retired captain of the Luhansk People’s Republic,” one of the two secessionist provinces in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, where Russia has been in a proxy war with Kyiv since 2018.
Mangushev has been linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a troll farm suspected of participation in cyberattacks in the U.S. and elsewhere. the Latvia-based news site Meduza “he likes the totalitarian aesthetic of the student rally with the Z’s and the Sieg Heiling,” referring to the WWII German salute.
Two days before invading Ukraine on February 24, Putin gave a speech denying that Ukraine had “real statehood,” calling it part of Russia’s “own history, culture, spiritual space.”
Analysts at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C, think tank, Putin’s “de-nazificiation” is a guise for “extinguishing Ukrainian statehood and eradicating all traces of a separate Ukrainian identity.”