Here’s how Ukraine was being reported by the West before the war.
Today, increasing reports of far-right violence, ultranationalism, and erosion of basic freedoms are giving the lie to the West’s initial euphoria. There are neo-Nazi pogroms against the Roma, rampant attacks on feminists and LGBT groups, book bans, and state-sponsored glorification of Nazi collaborators.
These stories of Ukraine’s dark nationalism aren’t coming out of Moscow; they’re being filed by Western media, including US-funded Radio Free Europe (RFE); Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Center; and watchdogs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, which issued a joint report warning that Kiev is losing the monopoly on the use of force in the country as far-right gangs operate with impunity.
Five years after Maidan, the beacon of democracy is looking more like a torchlight march. A neo-Nazi battalion in the heart of Europe
If you whitewash NAZI POGROMS just because you want to beat Russia, fuck you. Siding with far-right fascists to defeat far-right fascists doesn’t make you the good guy. There is no lesser of two evils here.
If you dismiss any criticism of Ukraine as Russian propaganda, you might want to ask why the rest of the world, including the West, was concerned about Nazism in the area and then suddenly changed their tune only after the war started.
We should be getting both sides into peace negotiations, not prolonging the bloodshed and providing Nazis with illegal cluster bombs
I’ve collected a list of YouTube videos from western news sources on Ukraine’s neo-nazi problem, I’m gonna post it whenever the topic comes up, others feel free to do the same
BBC Newsnight - Neo-Nazi threat in new Ukraine (2014)
VICE News - Under Fire with the Azov Battalion (2014)
The Guardian - Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp (2017)
NBC News - Ukraine’s Hyper-Nationalist Military Summer Camp for Kids (2017)
DW Documentary - Women and the Azov battalion in Kyiv, Ukraine (2017)
BBC Newsnight - Ukraine: On patrol with the far-right National Militia (2018)
Associated Press - Nationalist camp in Ukraine trains kids to kill (2018)
TIME - Inside A White Supremacist Militia in Ukraine (2021)
VICE - Why the Far Right Joined the 2013-14 Ukraine Crisis (2021)
Working archive links for all of those videos just in case any of them goes down:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140228232131/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SBo0akeDMY
https://web.archive.org/web/20140907084820/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKnFSzMefIY
https://web.archive.org/web/20170905090805/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiBXmbkwiSw
https://web.archive.org/web/20170714144930/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpV16BQfbrQ
https://web.archive.org/web/20190407192642/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meWM4lChqy4
https://web.archive.org/web/20180404143154/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE6b4ao8gAQ
https://web.archive.org/web/20201101184729/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsHBdyqKpfo
https://web.archive.org/web/20210129113645/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy910FG46C4
https://web.archive.org/web/20210516085544/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC1oCpnDURc
Good work