First of all, I have no intention of taking or promoting any side here, because I'm not well informed enough about what has happened since 2022... however, before getting burned out of the internet somewhen by the end of the last decade, I used to follow a lot of anarchist collectives. I was on Riseup and Autistici mailing lists, and I remember reading a lot about everything that was happening in Ukraine directly from the anarchists there, the protests being led by openly fascist paramilitary groups like the C14, Svoboda, Tryzub, Pravy Sektor, the SNA that became the Azov Battalion, tons of pictures and videos documenting everything and everyone, even American Blackwater mercenaries operating in the country. These fascist groups clashing with socialists, setting fire to union buildings and shooting people trying to escape, and now it's hard to even find references to these groups and their actions on the internet, like it was sanitized (not so long ago, I also had trouble finding some materials from antizionist rabbis I had read back in the mid-2000s, I actually just found accusations of them being antisemitic on main search engines, so I really believe there is a lot of fuckery going on to control information)... and I'm afraid if I start talking about Donetsk and Lugansk I might get accused of something, so never mind.
I'm mentioning it because it has been only a few months since I joined Lemmy, and I've seen some controversy about accusations of nazis in Ukrainian lines, like it's tankie propaganda or that Dugin shit... but, uh, back when pro-EU factions took the government, the anarchists had documented the nazis very well... is there a generational gap of information here? How many people were following anarchist press (not the shit you'd find on Twitter, Tumblr, or whatever) back in 2014?
ps: I'm not here to discuss Russia.
edit: fixed some grammar mistakes I noticed, but I'm no native speaker.
I taught language lessons to Ukrainians for a while, including those from the seperatist regions. It was a bit of a joke that I'd have to translate stuff into 'east Ukrainian' because their Ukrainian wasn't great. My impression was that even if once many had been fond of Russia, that had now changed.
From what I've gathered, from a Russian viewpoint it's less ironic. For them nazism is less about the ideology and its fundamentally anti-semitic nature. For them the Nazis were people who sought to wipe out the Russians. This is not entirely unreasonable. IRC up to 20 million Russian civilians died in the war.
After the war, the USSR had a falling out with Israel, so often the Jews weren't even mentioned explicitly when discussing the holocaust, it was politically inconvenient. For example, they erected a monument at Babi Yar, the Nazi concentration camp near Kyiv, but the plaque didn't mentioned the Jews that had died there. It simply honoured the 'peaceful soviet people'. You'll even see elements of the Russian far right suggest the Jews perpetrated the holocaust against the Russians.
But it's not entirely weird that Russians think the holocaust was mainly perpetrated against the Russians. It's also not weird that they think anti-Russia = Nazi, given how many people died. But this is partly why they see no hypocrisy in calling Jews like Zelensky Nazis. Nazi means something different in Russia.
Of course, given we have a different conception of the holocaust and Nazism in the west, Russian propaganda needs to exagerate Ukraine's nazi problem as much as possible to foreign audiences, because the idea that Jewish Zelensky is a nazi is a harder sell abroad. When you see Putin apologists here in the fediverse, you can often tell they don't fully grasp this difference when they're parroting Russian narratives.
This is obviously controversial, but there's also a debate to be had about the role of Soviet/Russian anti-Zionist propaganda on the left. I would argue it's influence has often been counter-productive. A Russian audience might not blink if you call Jews Nazis, but outside Russia a Jewish fascist / zionist will have an easier time defending himself from accusations of Nazism(which in the western world is widely understood to be a fundamentally anti-semitic ideology), than he would defending himself against accusations of fascism. Hell, government ministers like Smotrich have openly admitted to being fascists. Accuse Smotrich of Nazism? "I'm Jewish. I can't be a nazi. You're lying about that, so you're lying about everything else."