On April 18, a flyer appeared in Ukraine’s eastern city of Donetsk that brought back memories of 1941 for the city’s Jewish residents. Bearing the stamp of the “Donetsk Republic”—the label used by separatists in the region—it requested Jewish residents to register with the local city authorities and pay a head tax. For added effect, flyers were nailed to a tree directly outside of a synagogue to ensure that the congregation would discover them after services. The small Jewish community of Donetsk was terrified.

This was not the first incidence of anti-Semitic imagery during the Ukraine crisis. When tensions were building in Crimea prior to the Russian annexation, a synagogue in Simferopol was defaced with swastikas and the words “death to the Jews.” (As with the Donetsk flyer the perpetrators remain unknown.) And in the lead-up to the Crimean referendum, a billboard appeared there showing two Crimeas: one colored black with a red swastika in the middle, and the other in the white, blue, and red colors of the Russian flag. Underneath the two images, the word “choose.” The Crimeans chose the second option.

Jews comprise less than 0.5 percent of the Ukrainian population. Yet anti-Semitic caricatures and Nazi imagery have taken center stage in the renewed conflict between Russia and the West. Jews have been cast in contradictory roles by the Kremlin and pro-Russians: On the one hand, they are helpless victims in need of protection from genocidal fascists; on the other, they are the villains behind a nationalist coup. The voices of Ukraine’s actual Jewish population, clearly in favor of Euromaidan, have been drowned out by this overwhelming, bizarre bricolage.

Cast in the role of victims, Ukrainian Jews have become a convenient political tool justifying Russian intervention in Ukraine. As the ranks of Euromaidan protesters grew to almost one million in December 2013, Russian officials and media developed what remains the Russian party line: that the Ukrainian revolution amounts to an ultranationalist fascist coup.

Russian television and newspaper accounts in the early weeks of Euromaidan unanimously reported that the Ukrainian state was under attack by neo-Nazis, fascists, and bandits. Speaking at a press conference from Russia on March 11, Ukraine’s fugitive president Viktor Yanukovych called Ukraine’s constitutionally formed interim government a “band of ultranationalists” and “neo-fascists.” Top Russian officials repeatedly linked the Euromaidan revolution and the interim government with fascism. In an interview, Alexey Pushkov, chairman of the international affairs committee of the Russian State Duma, claimed that “the forces which are in power in Kiev rely to a large extent on pro-Nazi parties.” In a press conference, President Vladimir Putin called the government in Kiev an “orgy of nationalists and extremists and anti-Semites.” The message was clear: the protesters are Nazis, the interim government contains Nazis, and before long they will come for the Jews.