“But Isn’t Zelenskyy A Nazi?”

On 22 June, 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa the Nazis invaded Ukraine. They established the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and swept through razing towns, unleashing death squads, and massacring Jews by the hundreds of thousands.

In one village, four Jewish brothers enlisted in the military, said goodbye to their parents, and walked off to fight the Nazis. By the war’s end in 1945, only one of the brothers – Semyon – was still alive. Semyon had gone to fight in the Red Army and wound up in command of a mortar platoon. He returned to find that the Nazis had torched his entire village, burning his parents to death.

The Nazis had murdered between 1.2 and 1.6 million Ukrainian Jews in what became known as the “Holocaust by Bullets.”

Semyon became a senior officer in Kryvyi Rih’s police force, investigating organized crime or, as his grandson Volodymyr Zelenskyy later put it, “catching bad guys.” Stories of Semyon’s service in the Second World War made a profound impression on the young Volodymyr, as did the traumas of the Holocaust.

Semyon married a fellow Ukrainian Jew who had survived the war by fleeing to central asia. Two years after their marriage, in that same city, they had a son Oleksandr; keeping alive the family line. Thirty-one years after that, Oleksandr had his own little boy; Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Like many Ukrainians growing up in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Volodymyr’s first language was Russian. BUt that doesn’t mean he felt kinship with the Russian Soviets.

As a child, Zelenskyy remembers his grandmothers talking about the years when Soviet soldiers came to confiscate the food grown in Ukraine, its vast harvests of grain and wheat all carted away at gunpoint. It was part of Stalin’s attempt in the early 1930s to remake Soviet society, and it led to a catastrophic famine known as the Holodomor — “murder by hunger” — that killed at least 3 million people in Ukraine.

In the lead up to the Russian break of the ceasefire that triggered the current war in Ukraine, Russian leader Vladimir Putin began spreading the rumor that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the son and grandson of Ukrainian Jews whose lineage was almost wiped out by Nazis after being starved by Russians, is himself a Nazi.

Donald Trump, angry that Zelenskyy wouldn’t create false information implicating Hunter Biden in a scandal that Trump could use against Joe Biden, was all to happy to repeat Putin’s lies. Interestingly, even some American liberals got the “Zelenskyy is a Nazi” fabrication stuck in their heads.

People parroting this propaganda often point to the existence of the Azov Battalion. Ukraine had neo-nazis within their national guard, and were faced with a quandry; these men were good fighters, but had a problematic ideology. Keep them in the Ukrainian armed forces and they might spread their BS to others. Release them and they might go over to the Russian side, when RUssia had already seized Crimea.

So the Azov Battalion was formed. Consisting of between 900 and 2,500 men depending on when the count was taken, this allowed the Ukrainian armed forces to partition these neo nazis from other Ukrainian soldiers while keeping them fighting for, not against, Ukraine.

At it’s zenith 2,500 men is far, far less than the neo nazis within Russian or US armed forces, as a percentage or as raw numbers.