DISINFO: Prestigious British journalist claims denazifying Ukraine is fully justified
SUMMARY
British journalist David Hearst confirmed that Putin is denazifying Ukraine. The editor-in-chief of the Middle East Eye said that “you can condemn him however you want”, but his main goal, denazification, is fully justified. That is proven by historical reality, that is the role of Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who invaded Ukraine along with the Gestapo in 1941. Once again, Russia takes the role of finishing the Nazi scumbags.
RESPONSE
This is a big distortion of the original interview with Middle East Eye editor-in-chief David Hearst, who never said that “denazification is fully justified”. While Hearst is very critical of the role of historical Ukrainian figures such as Stepan Bandera and criticises how, according to him, there is close-to-zero examination of this and other problematic aspects, he didn’t state any of the sentences claimed and highlighted in this disinformation narrative.
The video clip that accompanies this disinformation narrative has been heavily edited to remove all sentences that contradict Russian messages. For example, Hearst says in the original video: “There is virtually no examination of Putin's central claim that he is denazifying Ukraine. And, of course, that is completely wrong. However, there's a grain of historical reality about this, in particular the role of Stepan Bandera”. Hearst also says that “you can condemn Putin completely for all the mistakes he's made, for wishing basically to rub out Ukraine as a separate nation and as a people. I completely agree with that”. In the disinformation video, however, all the words in Italics have been deleted.
Pro-Kremlin media frequently resort to this manipulative technique of quoting sentences from serious publications or journalists and then introducing a distorted message as if it was part of the original story.
In this case, the goal of this manipulation is to further promote messaging about ‘Nazi Ukraine’, a frequent pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative used to justify Russia’s brutal aggression against its neighbour. Russia spent years preparing the information battleground prior to its kinetic attack, including baseless allegations about the supposed Nazi character of Ukraine and its allies in order to portray Russia’s invasion as a “denazification operation”.
See other examples of similar disinformation narratives, such as claims that From Berlin to Kyiv, Nazi history repeats itself, that Russia’s military operation against neo-Nazis in Ukraine was unavoidable, that the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv must be brought to an end, that Zelenskyy is the heir of German Nazism, or that the West turns Ukraine into an anti-Russian neo-Nazi project.