After a bloody month of war, after the discovery of evidence of war crimes in cities such as Bucha and Borodyanka, the language in the same version has become even more extreme, containing calls for social cleansing and “retraining” that Western officials said could cause further abuse on the spot. “Ukrainianism is an artificial anti-Russian construct that has no cultural identity of its own, a secondary element of an extraterrestrial and extraterrestrial civilization,” a RIA Novosti columnist wrote earlier this week. Ukraine’s “retraining” could last a generation, he wrote, adding that “in addition to the higher echelons, a significant number of ordinary people are also guilty of being passive Nazis and Nazi accomplices.” Even the name Ukraine should be deleted, the article argued. Opinions once held on the sidelines in Russia have been circulating in the mainstream media and voiced on the TV show primetime as the stakes of Russia’s war in Ukraine have risen. Western observers from Ukraine to the United States worry that the language could encourage the abuse of civilians by soldiers on the ground. “This is another piece of evidence for a future trial of Russian war criminals,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, citing a RIA Novosti article that caused a stir among Western officials. One of his aides accused the news agency of calling for the mass killing of Ukrainian civilians. Civilians in Ukraine have reported that Russian soldiers have reported conspiracy theories about bio-weapons laboratories or told them they were only here to “clean them of dirt”. “Such comments really create an even more toxic information environment,” said a Western official, and that they could “absolutely contribute” to the abuse of civilians in Ukraine. “Of course, the responsibility for this lies with the perpetrators, but it also lies with the Russian leadership,” he added. Increasingly, Russian experts are claiming that a significant section of Ukrainian society is dominated by far-right ideologies, blaming Ukraine’s strong resistance to the onslaught of mass psychosis rather than legitimate anger over the Russian invasion. “To my horror, to my regret, a significant part of the Ukrainian people turned out to be immersed in the madness of Nazism,” said Margarita Simonian, head of the RT news network, during a national talk show on NTV. . “That it is on such a large scale!” Analysts have pointed to the failure of Russia’s war in its early stages, as well as images of protests in cities against the Russian occupation forces over the escalation of Russian rhetoric. “Initially, the Russians believed that ‘de-nationalization’ could be completed through regime change and that the Ukrainians should be liberated,” wrote Greg Yudin, a Russian sociologist, earlier this week. “Obviously, this perception failed when the Ukrainians began to resist bravely. “A natural conclusion from this: the Ukrainians turned out to be deeply infected by Nazism.” As Vladimir Putin called on his officials to push back the “information war” in the West, claiming that there were reports of atrocities in Bucha, the government line has also come closer to some of the most extreme views in the Russian news. Former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said earlier this week that Ukraine would face the same fate as Nazi Germany, a view very similar to that written in a column published by RIA Novosti a few days earlier. “It should come as no surprise that Ukraine, which has become mentally transformed into the Third Reich, will suffer the same fate,” Medvedev wrote in a Telegram message. “This is her fate, this is Ukraine!”
