When Russian soldiers invaded Lubyanka, a village near the ravaged Kyiv suburb of Bucha, the Russians forced all the men to assemble in a central square. Then the invaders demanded that the Nazis step forward.
“The men laughed,” I was told by Iryna Rayko, a Ukrainian American whose sister in Lubyanka recently informed her by phone of the details. “They said, ‘There are no Nazis here, we are just Ukrainians who love our country.'”
Luckily none of these men were murdered in the square in February. But the Russian military’s fixation on rooting out “Nazis” reflects the Big Lie Vladimir Putin tells his people to justify the Ukraine war. He insists that Ukraine is led by Nazis – backed by the United States and NATO – and that the country is riddled with Nazi sympathizers.
Putin’s Big Lie provides the Russian military with justification for more war crimes against civilians (after all, they’re Nazis). It justifies the Russian president’s goal of bringing Ukraine back under control of Greater Russia. It also allows him to blame Russian military crimes on Ukrainian “Nazis” who kill their own people.
So Putin will pay no heed to Western charges of war crimes or genocide, and Russians won’t press him to do so. There is no hope of a negotiated end to the war unless he and the Russian public can be forced to face the truth.