After Russia launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, several far-right media figures and fringe outlets offered subtle support for the invasion, often repeating Russia’s own propaganda justifying the attack.
On Wednesday, February 23, Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced what he called a “special military operation” in Ukraine and proceeded to launch a series of missile attacks near the capital of Kyiv. Over the next two weeks, Russian air and ground forces pummeled Ukrainian civilian and military targets as they pushed further into Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian forces have displayed stiff resistance against the Russian military, which managed to take only the city of Kherson as the invasion force struggled to gain ground.
Following the invasion, an international alliance led by the United States announced targeted sanctions against Russian banks and oligarchs, a growing list of companies stopped operations in Russia, and the U.S. is now set to ban all imports of Russian oil.
Before the war, Putin spent years insisting that allowing Ukraine to join NATO — something the country has pushed for consistently since 2019, and had previously pursued in 2008 — would be a “menacing” and existential threat to Russia. In the days leading up to the invasion, Russian state media promoted false stories of a network of American labs creating biological weapons in Ukraine. And when Putin announced his “special military operation,” he claimed it was to target Nazis in the government and protect Ukrainian citizens from genocide.
These excuses, of course, are baseless. While Ukraine has been angling to join NATO for some time, the country has never threatened Russia with weapons of mass destruction. Ukraine willingly gave up the third-largest nuclear stockpile in the world in 1994 as part of the Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for an explicit security guarantee from the world’s other nuclear powers, including the Russian Federation.
There is also no proof of any U.S.-run biological weapons labs in Ukraine. And Putin’s claims to be protecting Ukrainians from Nazis, and protecting ethnic Russians from genocide, are nonsense. Putin’s argument that far-right nationalists and Nazis control the government of Ukraine ignores the reality that President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. Meanwhile, Putin’s trumped-up concern for native Russian speakers is based on a January 2022 provision requiring Ukrainian media publications to use the Ukrainian language. There is no proof, however, of any genocide against native Russian speakers in Ukraine.
Those facts have not stopped far-right media figures and fringe outlets from furthering Russia’s disinformation campaign, defending the invasion, and declaring Ukraine to be a “client state of the US.”