'Ukraine is impossible as a nation-state': Russian propaganda outlet encourages full-scale genocide

A Russian state propaganda outlet earlier this week called for full-scale genocide against Ukraine as the country's armed forces face allegations of war crimes.

The extraordinary article, published in RIA Novosti on Tuesday by correspondent Timofey Sergeytsev, repeatedly stated that Russia's efforts to "denazify" Ukraine require the "liquidation" of any and all persons whom the Kremlin suspects of being active or undercover operatives.

Russian President Vladimir Putin frequently claims that the democratically-elected Ukrainian government – led by Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – is actually a clandestine cabal of Nazis hellbent on murdering ethnic Russians.

Sergeytsev promoted this demonstrably false and dangerous lie in his piece and rationalized the indiscriminate slaughter of Ukrainian combat units and citizens alike. The world has bore witness to these Russian-inflicted atrocities in cities such as the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, its suburb of Bucha, and the port metropolis of Mariupol.

"Denazification is a set of measures in relation to the Nazified mass of the population, which technically cannot be subjected to direct punishment as war criminals," he wrote. "The Nazis who took up arms should be destroyed to the maximum on the battlefield. No significant distinction should be made between APU and the so-called national battalions, as well as the territorial defense that joined these two types of military formations. All of them are equally involved in extreme cruelty against the civilian population, equally guilty of the genocide of the Russian people, do not comply with the laws and customs of war. War criminals and active Nazis should be exemplarily and exponentially punished."

That passage alone has undertones that mirror Adolf Hitler's Germany. But Sergeytsev was nowhere near finished, adding that "there must be a total lustration" and mass "re-education" of whatever percentage of the population that Moscow decides to spare.

Continuing on, the author accused "Western Banderas" – a reference to Ukrainian Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera in World War II – of being the architects of Naziism in Ukraine. Based on this false premise, Sergeytsev declared that Ukraine – both in name and function – should be wiped off the map forever.

"Ukraine, as history has shown, is impossible as a nation-state, and attempts to 'build' one naturally lead to Nazism. Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construction that does not have its own civilizational content, a subordinate element of an alien and alien civilization," he said. "Debanderization by itself will not be enough for denazification - the Bandera element is only a performer and a screen, a disguise for the European project of Nazi Ukraine, therefore the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization."

He then laid out a 10-point plan for how Russia can achieve its objectives:

The operation to denazify Ukraine, which began with a military phase, will follow the same logic of stages in peacetime as a military operation. At each of them, it will be necessary to achieve irreversible changes, which will become the results of the corresponding stage. In this case, the necessary initial steps of denazification can be defined as follows:
—liquidation of armed Nazi formations (which means any armed formations of Ukraine, including the Armed Forces of Ukraine), as well as the military, informational, educational infrastructure that ensures their activity;
—the formation of public self-government bodies and militia (defense and law enforcement) of the liberated territories, protecting the population from the terror of underground Nazi groups;
—installation of the Russian information space;
—the withdrawal of educational materials and the prohibition of educational programs at all levels containing Nazi ideological guidelines;
—mass investigative actions to establish personal responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity, the spread of Nazi ideology and support for the Nazi regime;
—lustration, publication of the names of accomplices of the Nazi regime, involving them in forced labor to restore the destroyed infrastructure as punishment for Nazi activities (from among those who will not be subject to the death penalty or imprisonment);
—the adoption at the local level, under the supervision of Russia, of primary normative acts of denazification "from below", a ban on all types and forms of the revival of Nazi ideology;
—the establishment of memorials, commemorative signs, monuments to the victims of Ukrainian Nazism, perpetuating the memory of the heroes of the struggle against it;
—the inclusion of a complex of anti-fascist and denazification norms in the constitutions of the new people's republics;
—creation of permanent denazification bodies for a period of 25 years.

Sergeytsev's essay did not end there, however.

"Russia will have no allies in the denazification of Ukraine," he explained. "Since this is a purely Russian business. And also because not just the Bandera version of Nazi Ukraine will be eradicated, but also, and above all, Western totalitarianism, the imposed programs of civilizational degradation and disintegration, the mechanisms of subjugation to the superpower of the West and the United States."

Sergeytsev claimed that the West, particularly the United States, is ungrateful for "everything that Russia has done" for it. That grievance stems from the enormous losses that the former Soviet Union incurred – estimates ranging from 24-40 million – throughout the Second World War.

"Russia did everything possible to save the West in the 20th century. She implemented the main Western project, an alternative to capitalism, which won the nation-states - the socialist, red project. It crushed German Nazism, the monstrous offspring of the crisis of Western civilization," Sergeytsev said, conveniently omitting the fact that millions of Soviet citizens – Ukrainians among them – perished under the terrorizing reign of dictator Josef Stalin.

"The last act of Russian altruism was the outstretched hand of friendship from Russia, for which Russia received a monstrous blow in the 1990s," he added, alluding to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Sergeytsev concluded his dissertation by proclaiming that regardless of what happens in Ukraine, Russia "will go its own way, not worrying about the fate of the West, relying on another part of its heritage - leadership in the global process of decolonization."