Russians Pounce

We’re all familiar with the “conservatives pounce” framing of a story. Instead of reporting the news story that Planned Parenthood directors were caught on video discussing the market for fetal organ tissue, mainstream outlets would say, “Conservative Pounce on Planned Parenthood Over Sting Video.” Or this New York Times headline, “Vatican Power Struggle Bursts Into Open as Conservatives Pounce.” That story was about the lax and indulgent treatment that a progressive sex-pest cardinal received at the hands of a progressive pope. In the mainstream, the rape-and-reassign story wasn’t the story, but rather the leverage that reactionaries were unfortunately extracting from it.

Now look at this story and the framing:

This is one of those “now it can be said” stories. A year ago, if you pointed out the highly visible presence of neo-Nazi militias in the Ukrainian war effort, you were accused of spreading Kremlin propaganda. This was always dishonest, because the U.S. had previously set strenuous policies on military aid to Ukraine before the war, demanding that our weapons not go to such militias. Now, the ugly truth has become so obvious that it has to be acknowledged even by the New York Times.

But notice that the story is reframed as “Russians pounce”:

The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism.

In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin’s propaganda and giving fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be “de-Nazified” — a position that ignores the fact that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. More broadly, Ukraine’s ambivalence about these symbols, and sometimes even its acceptance of them, risks giving new, mainstream life to icons that the West has spent more than a half-century trying to eliminate.

The article dances around the issues through misdirection. Yes, calling Ukraine a Nazi state “ignores” that Zelensky is Jewish. But the bizarre alliances and contradictions between liberals like Zelensky and the Banderite ultranationalists has been the motor of Ukraine politics since the Maidan revolution in 2014. One of the reasons Zelensky could not make good on his campaign promises to end the conflict in the Donbas was that his government never got control of the ultranationalist militias involved in it. And Zelensky leads an elected government that very recently gave special honors to the memory of Stepan Bandera, a World War II–era Ukrainian Nazi collaborator, a gesture that drew a sharp rebuke from Poland. The reality is complex.

Shouldn’t the story try to give readers a sense of how influential Nazi and racialist ideology is among Ukraine’s ultranationalist paramilitaries? Shouldn’t it give us some perspective about the balance of ideological forces, or characterize their relationship? Shouldn’t it raise questions about the long-term political risks — to Ukraine most of all — of arming militias that are captive to these ideologies and that have only a tenuous connection to the elected government? Instead the entire article is framed as if the danger of armed Nazis is that it might make Putin look like he has a point.

This is a juvenile way of thinking about the real world, and yet these taboos constrain our ability to discuss the American interest forthrightly. Hawks have been making the case that assisting Ukraine is a matter of dear urgency to the entire world order, that the fate of the Donbas is our own. If that’s the case, there’s no reason to be this prissy about arming and empowering Nazis along the way. You can’t save the world without saving a few bad apples. I get it.

For the rest of us who have some concerns about how this project has been conceived, who think the stakes are a bit lower, well, the presence of so many proud Nazi symbols remains troubling. I’m not afraid of disapproving of Nazis just because Putin claims to deplore them too.