The piece published on Monday is full of appalling claims that are clearly recycling the staunchest anti-Ukrainian narratives of the Kremlin with its demands of ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarization’. According to the author, such ‘irreversible changes” can be achieved through forced labor, the death penalty and imprisonment of Ukrainians.

The author coins the word ‘Ukrainism’ that is described and dismissed as  an ‘anti-Russian construction’ that, along with the current ‘Banderite’ leadership who endorseі it should be ‘de-nazified’ and ‘de-europiezed’.

The piece takes the issue with Ukrainian independence branding it a ‘Nazi’ idea in disguise.

According to the author,  the ‘Nazism” in Ukraine is ‘disguised as a desire for ‘independence’ and a ‘European’ (Western, pro-American) path of ‘development’ (in reality – to degradation).

’Unlike, say, Georgia and the Baltic countries, Ukraine, as history has shown, is impossible as a nation-state, and attempts to “build” one naturally lead to Nazism’.

The ‘majority’ of Ukrainians are called ‘passive Nazis, accomplices of Nazism’ who are ‘guilty’ and, thus, ‘must survive the hardships of the war and assimilate the experience as a historical lesson and atonement for [their] guilt’.

The author also claims Ukrainians should be denied even the right to their Ukrainian identity, arguing that the ‘ethnic component of self-identification’ of Ukraine needs to be rejected while the name “Ukraine” should be removed from any “fully denazified state entity’.

Ukraine must be denied sovereignty as ‘a denazified country cannot be ‘sovereign’ while the ‘winner’, assumingly Russia, has a right to carry out “denazification” which is ‘necessary’ and must target the ‘significant part of the people – most likely the majority  that has been mastered and drawn into the Nazi regime in its politics’.  In a sweeping judgement, the author calls for all Ukrainians to be punished, arguing ‘the hypothesis ‘the people are good – the government is bad’ does not work’.

No defender of Ukraine, military or volunteer, by the author’s judgment, should be spared as those who have taken up arms fighting the Russian invasion in Ukraine must be ‘destroyed to the maximum’.

In retaliation for their armed resistance to Russian troops, Ukrainians will have to face reprisals through ‘ideological repressions’ and ‘strict censorship’ for Ukrainian politics, culture, and education.

The author doesn’t stop short of even offering a full ban of Ukrainian school books, forced labor for civilians, and full re-write of the Ukrainian Constitution to legalize ‘Novorosiya’ and ‘Malorosiya’ regions.

 

The English tranlslation of the RIA Novosti op-ed can be found here.