Putin’s Justification for War Is Unraveling

As he condemned the mutiny of Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in late June, Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated his justification for the invasion of Ukraine. According to Putin, Russia had to eliminate the dire threat of a hostile Ukraine armed by the West and guided by a fascist ideology nurtured by the United States. Russia was “fighting fiercely for its future, repelling the aggression of neo-Nazis and their masters.” In late July, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov affirmed that Russia would never abandon the supposed goal of eliminating the Western-backed neo-Nazi danger.

The Kremlin has long used the antifascist struggle of the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call World War II, as a framework to explain and justify its domestic and foreign policies. The application of this narrative to the war in Ukraine is now buckling under pressure. As he launched his short-lived revolt, Prigozhin maintained in a posted video that Russia’s corrupt military leadership had deceived Putin into believing that NATO and Ukraine were preparing to attack Russia: The invasion of Ukraine wasn’t needed to safeguard Russia from a manufactured neo-Nazi threat. About a month later, on July 20, CIA Director William Burns observed that Prigozhin’s video, which was widely viewed in Russia, “was the most scathing indictment of Putin’s rationale for war … that I have heard from a Russian or a non-Russian.”

Prigozhin’s claim that the military leadership manipulated the justification for war further undermines popular and elite belief in an imminent neo-Nazi threat from Ukraine managed by the United States. While a majority of respondents in Russian surveys voice support for the Russian military in Ukraine, observers suggest this stance may often reflect dissembling or weakly held rationalizations. In a recent survey, a majority of respondents supported the war (43 percent indicated “strong support”). But 41 percent also believed the invasion had created more harm than benefit for Russia. Among the 38 percent who perceived more benefit than harm, only 9 percent thought the value of the “special military operation” was in its “protection against fascism and Nazism,” and even fewer respondents (3 percent) believed the war had rallied the support of society.

Nevertheless, Putin remains committed to the weaponization of historical memory against the West and Ukraine. This discursive approach builds on Putin’s pre-invasion charges of antisemitism and genocide against Russia’s foreign critics, condemning the behavior of Poles, Ukrainians, and other regional actors during World War II for assisting in the Holocaust. Unlike the Soviet regime, Putin’s rendition of the Great Patriotic War now openly commemorates the Red Army’s role in ending the Nazi genocide against the Jews.

This conceptual pivot marked an escalation in Russia’s response to the long-standing accusations by governments and groups in Eastern Europe that Soviet behavior during this period was itself genocidal. Just as narratives of victimization in Eastern Europe were often linked to the efforts of post-communist elites at state- and nation-building that cast the Soviet Union as a malevolent “other,” the Kremlin has now reinforced its opposing account. For Putin, Russians and Jews were both victims of genocide in World War II. This revised narrative encouraged the Kremlin to falsely identify Ukraine’s policies toward Russian speakers in the Donbas region as genocide and the invasion of 2022 as a necessary response. Putin has used this claim of genocide, which lacks any supporting evidence (civilian casualties in Donbas remained relatively low for the period from 2015 to 2022), to establish another link between the Great Patriotic War, the Holocaust, and the most recent invasion.

Given the asserted need to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, Putin views the support of Russia’s Jews as essential. Yet prominent Russian Jews have criticized the Kremlin’s often ham-fisted attempts to politicize the memory of the Holocaust or vilify Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a Jew who supports neo-Nazis. In May 2022, Lavrov caused a furor when he compared Zelensky to Hitler, who “had Jewish blood.” Lavrov observed that “wise” Jews understood that the “worst antisemites” are found among Jews themselves.

Berel Lazar, Russia’s chief rabbi and a leader of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FEOR), had withheld support for the invasion but had also refrained from direct criticism.

He now called on Lavrov to retract the comments that Jews were essentially responsible for the Holocaust and the associated accusation that Zelensky leads a neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine that threatens Russia. Rabbi Alexander Boroda, the president of FEOR, implored all sides in the conflict to stop exploiting the tragic events of the Holocaust and World War II for political gain.

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The Israeli government criticized Lavrov’s “lies,” and Putin eventually apologized to Israel’s prime minister. Yet Lavrov persisted, later stating that the West had instigated the current war to accomplish a “final solution” to the “Russian question,” thus equating Western support for Ukraine with the evils of Nazi Germany.

The unwillingness of Jewish leaders in Russia to support the war, despite pressure from the Kremlin, has exposed the community to retaliation, including constraints on the activities of the Russian branch of the Jewish Agency, the organization that facilitates the immigration of Jews to Israel. Another possible example of retaliation is the article by Aleksey Pavlov, the former assistant secretary of Russia’s Security Council. Pavlov examined the purported spread of neo-paganism and cults in Ukraine, tracing the phenomenon to Ukrainian ultra-nationalists aligned with Nazi Germany and later to the malicious policies of the United States. One of the “cults” identified by Pavlov is the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, the predominantly Jewish organization in both Ukraine and Russia. According to Pavlov, these groups must undergo “de-Satanization.”

Lazar criticized Pavlov’s article as “vulgar antisemitism.” An apology soon came from Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council, and Pavlov was removed from his position. But Russian Jews worry they may be exposed to further censure as Putin hardens his condemnation of an anti-Russian “collective West.” While pre-invasion surveys indicate that most Russians view Jews with respect and tolerance, Russians also perceive Jews as the group most closely associated with the West. Putin has publicly compared the West to Nazi Germany and has identified Russian supporters of Western values and policies as members of a fifth column who are “scum and traitors.” Such language may stimulate and reinforce Soviet-era antisemitism, which has survived in segments of Russia’s security services and other institutions, including the Russian Orthodox Church.

In this fraught environment, the leadership of the Jewish community in Russia attempts to maintain a careful balancing act.

In an address on June 16, Putin returned to the question of why the Ukrainian state was a neo-Nazi entity even though Zelensky is Jewish. According to Putin, his “many Jewish friends” believe that “Zelensky is not a Jew but a disgrace to the Jewish people. … Neo-Nazis, followers of Hitler, have been raised on pedestals as today’s heroes in Ukraine. … One and a half million [Jews] … were killed in Ukraine, and primarily at the hands of [Stepan] Bandera [the Ukrainian nationalist leader] followers.” After screening historical footage of WWII atrocities, Putin told the audience: “This is Bandera and his minions. These are the people who today are the heroes of Ukraine. … How can you not fight this?”

For years before the 2022 invasion, Russian propaganda focused on Bandera and the paramilitary units (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA) aligned with his faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B). Documentary evidence points to the role of members of Bandera’s organization in the widespread violent repression of Jews, Poles, and other ethno-cultural groups during World War II. While Bandera’s direct culpability is still debated by scholars, his xenophobia and extremist ideology enabled fellow leaders and supporters to justify their atrocities.

The popularity of Bandera has surged in Ukraine even though the ultra-nationalist organizations associated with his memory have declined since their peak in 2012, when Svoboda, the far-right party, gained 10 percent of the vote in national parliamentary elections. Svoboda’s short-lived electoral strength was due more to the appeal of its anti-Russian nationalism and populism than its far-right ideology, which the party gradually moderated in ensuing years. Nevertheless, the Kremlin has used Svoboda and paramilitary groups like the Right Sector coalition and the Azov movement to grossly exaggerate the political strength of the far right in Ukraine today.

In charging Kyiv with neo-fascism, the Kremlin has also denounced Ukraine’s often anti-Russian cultural and memory policies. In support of nation- and state-building, post-independence Ukraine has increasingly celebrated Bandera as a leader of Ukraine’s struggle for national sovereignty. More broadly, Kyiv has moved to replace the Soviet master narrative of Ukrainian history with a national story of its own, which emphasizes Ukraine’s victimization by a predatory Russia. In its account of World War II, the Ukrainian government often whitewashed the repressions of the OUN-UPA, particularly against Poles and Jews. This approach elicited harsh criticism from Russia, but also from Israel, Poland, Germany, the EU, and international Jewish communities. It also alienated much of the population in Ukraine’s Russophone east and south.

Nevertheless, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014 and particularly in 2022 underscored for many Ukrainians Bandera’s relevance as a nationalist. In 2014, more than 70 percent of respondents in Ukraine’s west saw Bandera in a positive light, while similar percentages in Ukraine’s Russophone south and east held a negative view of the controversial figure. The strong reaction of Ukrainian society to the Russian invasion of 2022 dramatically narrowed these regional differences: Most Ukrainians now express positive attitudes about Bandera: from 92 percent in the west to 73 percent in the east.

Although the Kremlin contends that such opinions are proof that Ukraine is in thrall to a neo-Nazi ideology supported by the United States, respondents in the same survey believe the OUN and its armed detachments were freedom fighters who resisted both Nazi and Soviet threats to Ukrainian independence. A daunting obstacle to Putin’s neo-Nazi narrative is that while Ukraine honors individuals from its past who were xenophobic, the Ukrainian state and the great majority of contemporary Ukrainians embrace a civic identity that the Russian invasion has largely strengthened.

Although Ukraine’s selective memory remains a source of tension with Poland, Israel, Germany, and other external actors and groups, the solidarity generated by the Russian invasion has for now worked to moderate disagreements over the past. Zelensky himself has moved away from, if slowly, Ukraine’s exculpatory stance toward the OUN and UPA. This careful shift likely reflects his, and Ukraine’s, general embrace of EU values as well as the desire for long-term security cooperation with Poland and NATO as a whole.

The low incidence of public expressions of antisemitism in Ukraine is also important. Despite an alarming spike in antisemitic violence and vandalism during the Maidan Revolution in 2014, a 2016 regional survey found that 95 percent of Ukrainian respondents accept Jews as citizens, the highest percentage among post-Soviet and post-communist countries (for Russia, the number was 86 percent). These attitudes, which counter major assumptions of Putin’s narrative, should, in time, broadly support more open dialogue in Ukraine about World War II.

Putin’s struggle to craft a coherent story that binds the invasion of Ukraine to the memory and conceptual framework of the Great Patriotic War is one of his biggest challenges. There is a lack of credible evidence—for the simple reason that it isn’t true—that Ukraine constitutes a neo-Nazi threat resembling the existential struggle of the Great Patriotic War, the only historical event able to stimulate intense national pride among Russians.

Theories of social conflict suggest that a threat can unite a group, including a society, but only if the group as a whole perceives the threat as authentic, powerful, and immediate. In Russia, the war against Ukraine doesn’t have that salience—in part because Putin’s narrative is simply too detached from reality.