For the record, what he means by Far Right is unclear to me:
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Unpacking Putin's 'Denazification' of Ukraine and My Forecasting Failure
undefined and Stratfor Director of Global Security Analysts at RANE
Sam Lichtenstein
Stratfor Director of Global Security Analysts at RANE, Stratfor
12 MIN READMar 9, 2022 | 21:01 GMT
A photo taken at a Moscow metro station on March 1, 2022, shows a mosaic panel depicting the liberation of Kyiv by Russia's Red Army in 1943.
A photo taken at a Moscow metro station on March 1, 2022, shows a mosaic panel depicting the liberation of Kyiv by Russia's Red Army in 1943.
(ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)
Author's Note: Last week, my colleague wrote why he was wrong about Ukraine. This week, it's my turn. I was also wrong about Ukraine. I thought the Russians would formalize their de facto control of the separatist republics in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region and perhaps grab a bit more territory in the surrounding areas (and near the Crimean Peninsula, which they had already annexed). But I did not think Russia would launch a full-scale invasion. In retrospect, there were many reasons for my analytic failure — not least of which was underestimating Russian President Vladimir Putin's risk tolerance. But one key indicator I undervalued was Putin's focus on the supposed need to ''denazify'' Ukraine in advance of the invasion. Had I given more weight to that variable, I may have forecast differently. Below is an initial review of what ''denazification'' means in this context, how I misjudged the importance of Putin's use of this phrase, and why the choice of this language is so concerning for global security and stability.
Putin's Misdeed: Misusing History
In his Feb. 24 address announcing Russia's ''special military operation'' in Ukraine, Putin offered many justifications for the war, but by far the most direct was the following:
''The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.''
It was a dramatic (and, for many reasons, inherently flawed) allegation that took many observers by surprise, although it was not the first time Putin and other senior officials had leveled variations of this accusation, albeit less explicitly. Perhaps most importantly and prominently, in his controversial July 2021 article ''On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,'' Putin repeatedly linked the modern Ukrainian state to Nazism, going so far as to accuse the government in Kyiv of creating ''a climate of fear in Ukrainian society, aggressive rhetoric, indulging neo-Nazis, and militarizing the country.'' In retrospect, it appears that Putin was laying the ideological groundwork for the line of argumentation that he and other Russian leaders would repeatedly reference in the intervening eight months. In various iterations, they warned that Ukraine's government was supposedly led by fascists intent on subjugating, if not outright conducting genocide against, ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. In turn, this meant it was incumbent on Russia to defend these peoples — with force, if deemed necessary.
No matter how absurd this argument may seem to most outsiders (for the record, there is absolutely no evidence of mass attacks against ethnic Russians), Russian leaders were able to manipulate elements of truth from Ukrainian society to build and propagate a self-serving narrative. To be sure, Ukraine, like many countries (including Russia) has a right-wing extremist problem, both historically and contemporarily. World War II-era Ukrainian nationalist leaders like Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and Yaroslav Stetsko remain widely seen as national heroes despite their Nazi sympathies and collaboration. More recently, far-right nationalists like Andriy Biletsky, Serhiy Sternenko and Dmytro Yarosh have made a name for themselves not only by standing up to Russian influence, but for their connections with right-wing violence and extremist groups as well. Meanwhile, ultranationalist political parties like Svoboda operate both as regional outfits and at a national level in Ukraine. Avowed neo-Nazi fighters from groups like the Azov Battalion have also integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces and/or continue to operate in separate paramilitary groups.
Despite their bluster, however, far-right nationalists as a whole (and neo-Nazis more specifically) have minimal influence in Ukraine's national politics or mainstream society. When Ukrainian ultranationalist political parties joined forces with Svoboda to jointly contest 2019 parliamentary elections, they won barely over 2% of the vote; this was even less than in 2014 and fell short of the 5% threshold to even secure a parliamentary seat through a combined party list (while Svoboda on its own only won one constituency). As for Azov, even the largest estimates put the number of its fighters in the low thousands — a figure dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian military personnel and volunteers who have recently joined to defend their country. While any level of right-wing extremism is clearly problematic for the government in Kyiv, it thus hardly amounts to the supposed existential neo-Nazi threat that Russian leaders have made it out to be.
In retrospect, I should have seen this more assertive Russian rhetoric not as merely a lever of influence to try to gain concessions, but instead as a statement of intent.
Ukraine is also hardly the only country with a history of Nazi collaboration during World War II. Many European countries, perhaps none more so than Germany itself, routinely announce investigations into far-right extremists in official posts. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany party (some of whose regional branches and individual members have been linked to extremism) holds at least some political sway, but no one would accuse the government in Berlin of being led by neo-Nazis. Similarly, in Russia, Putin himself exploits grassroots support from far-right nationalists such as Alexander Dugin and Konstantin Malofeev, as well as groups like the Izborsk Club — some of whom and which could easily be labeled neo-Nazis, even if they don't call themselves such.
While right-wing extremist activity in Ukraine is deeply troubling, it is by no means unique to the country, and to argue that today's government in Kyiv is led by neo-Nazis strains serious logic. In their effort to portray Ukrainian society as something akin to a reincarnation of the Third Reich, Russian leaders have grossly exaggerated the significance of right-wing extremism in Ukraine while ignoring the many countervailing forces in the country. And perhaps that is precisely why I discounted Russian neo-Nazi rhetoric in the run-up to the invasion: to me, it just seemed too ridiculous. But even if it appeared that way to me, it was not to Russian leaders, who — whether they truly believed it or not — were building a case for war with the need to ''denazify'' Ukraine as a primary justification.
My Error: Prioritizing Precedent Over New Information
What should have spurred me to adjust my forecast was Putin's Feb. 21 announcement formally recognizing eastern Ukraine's self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk republics as independent states, which enabled Russia to officially station troops in the two territories controlled pro-Russian separatists for military action against Ukraine several days later. In that speech, Putin again escalated his neo-Nazi accusations, saying that ethnic Russians in those territories faced the risk of genocide ''because these people did not agree with the West-supported coup in Ukraine in 2014 and opposed the transition towards the Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazi which have been elevated in Ukraine to the rank of national policy.''
Hours before his address, Putin's national security leadership team had already said as much to justify Putin's decision, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov castigating the West by noting ''the fact that [Western leaders] are now trying to prop up an overtly neo-Nazi, Banderite regime in Kyiv is also a manifestation of genocide,'' and that ''in both cases [referring back to the Western-backed independence of Kosovo from pro-Russian Serbian control in 2008], this is an attack against Slavs, against Orthodox Christians, and in Ukraine's case, against everything Russian.''
There was absolutely no evidence of any threat of genocide, but this extreme historical revisionism enabled Putin to portray himself as a liberator, rather than a conqueror (at least to his domestic audience). It also enabled Putin to appeal to his re-engineered version of history in which the modern Russian state denies that the Soviet Union was ever a Nazi collaborator, but instead acted only as a liberator in helping to free eastern Europeans from Nazi occupation, ignoring the Soviet domination that then replaced it.
In claiming ethnic Russians were under threat in Ukraine and then using force to adjust borders, it is Putin who much more closely resembles a certain World War II-era fascist dictator.
From my perspective, this was all absurd, but it was from the same playbook that Putin had previously used — and therefore I mistakenly fit my forecast of what would happen next into the mental model of past Russian behavior. Indeed, Putin justified his 2014 military offensive in Ukraine on the same grounds that ethnic Russians were under threat from the government in Kyiv — the same charge Putin leveled at Georgia's government in 2008 when Russian troops invaded the country ostensibly to protect ethnic Russians in border areas. In both the 2014 Ukraine offensive and the 2008 Georgia invasion, Russian military activity took place beyond the primary territorial disputes (most notably, with the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine — a clear and pure land grab as the territory was separate from the eastern Donbas region where Russian troops were supposedly intervening to protect the local population). However, in neither of these cases did the Russian military expand major operations across the entirety of either country with the goal of regime change. Instead, Russian troops carried out fairly short campaigns (just five days in the case of Georgia) with limited goals of capturing certain territories.
But Ukraine in 2022 was not Ukraine in 2014 or Georgia in 2008. It was one thing for Russian leaders to claim ethnic Russians were being persecuted, but it was quite another to essentially label the Ukrainian government as being led by neo-Nazis hellbent on mass violence. The alleged persecution of ethnic Russians in Ukraine could have still been used to justify a Russian military incursion, but not necessarily anything more; by contrast, the existential threat of a neighboring government being run by warmongering extremists inherently required more aggressive action. No matter how twisted, in the Russian narrative, it would be impossible to level those charges at the Ukrainian state without seeking to fundamentally change the regime — a much more expansive goal than merely intervening to ostensibly protect ethnic Russians. In retrospect, I should have seen this more assertive Russian rhetoric not as merely a lever of influence to try to gain concessions, but as a statement of intent. Russian leaders were preparing for a much larger campaign this time around, but in my analysis, I was giving much more weight to Moscow's older playbook than I should have.
The Dangers of Putin's 'Denazification' Myth
The signals I missed of course became clear in Putin's Feb. 24 speech announcing the Russian military action — which, no matter how he and state propaganda have characterized it, has been shown over the past two weeks to be nothing less than a full-scale invasion of the country with the apparent goal of regime change in Kyiv. In Putin's address, he further manipulated World War II-era history to fit his current objectives, even going so far as to make this cynical appeal to Ukrainian soldiers:
''Your fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazi occupiers and did not defend our common Motherland to allow today's neo-Nazis to seize power in Ukraine. You swore the oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people and not to the junta, the people's adversary which is plundering Ukraine and humiliating the Ukrainian people.''
Clearly, Putin had moved beyond what more limited goals of territorial control he may have once had to more maximalist objectives. The tragic outcome of that shift has been seen over the past two weeks, with further suffering expected in Ukraine and a cascade of worldwide ripple effects that are only beginning to be fully appreciated. Understandably lost amid these developments has been much of the historical revisionism that was central to Russia's justification for war. Russian troops have trampled on not only Ukrainian sovereignty, but history. It should not be lost on anyone that, in claiming ethnic Russians were under threat and then using force to adjust borders, Putin is the one who much more closely resembles a certain World War II-era fascist dictator who made similar claims about ethnic Germans.
If we cannot agree on the past, we should prepare for a more turbulent future.
It is frequently said that the victors get to write the first draft of history, but in this case, history is being completely rewritten to fit self-serving objectives. While the violent manifestation of that is seen most clearly in Ukraine today, what is to stop Russia from doing the same in a place like Moldova — another country with a pro-Russian separatist region supposedly under threat from the government in Chisinau? And looking elsewhere, China's leaders also indulge in the same sort of widespread historical manipulation that could one day provoke conflict, as do a host of tin-pot dictators who can stir up plenty of regional trouble with fantasies of righting supposed historical wrongs. In short, if we cannot agree on the past and accept revisionist views of history, we should prepare for a more turbulent future.
A world of increasingly frequent and impactful disruptions means that, as an analyst, I must remember the lessons I am taking away from my mistaken Ukraine forecast. Chiefly, this means not merely adding new information into a preexisting mental model of the most likely scenario, but instead routinely reevaluating the likelihood of the baseline scenario itself in light of new information. Even if brief, there was a moment between Putin's Feb. 21 announcement to recognize eastern Ukraine's separatist regions and his Feb. 24 address to announce the invasion where I had that opportunity to recalibrate my assessment. And while I may have missed it, I am pleased to say that some of my colleagues were more prepared. Having an analytic team that constantly questions assumptions and offers diverse (and, yes, divergent) views with well-reasoned arguments is crucial, as forecasting is always more effective when it takes into account various perspectives. When the next question about the potential for conflict escalation inevitably emerges — be it from Russia, China or another country — I know I'll be even more prepared to answer it.
