Last Saturday, the Communist party in Umeå organized a lecture about Ukraine. I was expecting that the discussion would be somewhat biased, because the communists are known for their pro-Russian position, but the reality proved to be much more depressing. The lecturer, a hardened communist from Uppsala, and a genocide-denier Mario Sousa filled an hour and a half of his presentation with nothing but lies and propaganda. He managed not to say a single word of truth about Ukraine, which is an achievement in itself. Every fact in his presentation was tendentiously selected and twisted, and whenever facts were not forthcoming, fake photo-shopped pictures were enough.

As you could expect, the gist of his presentation was to argue that Ukrainians are basically hitlers. The Ukrainian revolution, where over a hundred people were killed by the police, and which forced a corrupt government to escape to Russia, the country of their puppet-masters, was, to Mario Sousa, a Nazi coup. I wish he would tell the same in person to my friend, Ilya, a jazz musician, who spent entire days on the Kiev main square expecting a new police attack, rather than recording a new album. Or to my other friend, Helen, a PhD student in biology, who, together with her friends organized an outdoor kitchen, and almost every day volunteered to cook soup and tea for the protesters, in the freezing winter 2013-2014 in Kiev, putting aside her studies of Antarctic bacterial life.

To know the truth would be inconvenient for Mario Sousa, because that would ruin his world-picture, which he shared profusely with fellow communists and just curious citizens who found themselves in the lecture hall. Incidentally, there was very little mention of Russia in his presentation, almost none at all. It was not even Russia’s fault that Crimea was invaded and attached to Russia. In his “opinion”, the whole Ukrainian turmoil was a conspiracy of Western security services together with Jewish oligarchs (did I mention that the presentation also contained a pinch of casual anti-Semitism)?

To call Ukrainians Nazis is the keystone of Russian war propaganda, on which it spends more then 1,5 billion dollars a year only abroad. The purpose of this dangerous lie is to de-humanize the Ukrainians. It might be a problem to kill Ukrainians even for Russian nationalists and mercenaries, thousands of which are now fighting against the Ukrainian army in the Russian-occupied Donbas region. It is easy to kill Nazis. It would be natural to support a people who, after they got rid of a bloody dictator, suffered an invasion and war, and are fighting a powerful imperialist country in an unequal battle, but it would be difficult to feel empathy for someone who is called a Nazi. Even if we don’t really trust the source (who would trust the likes of Mario Sousa), we still think that the truth would be somewhere in the middle. Well, it is not. Sometimes the other argument is pure made-up outrageous lie whose purpose is to justify murder. This dangerous lie helps kill the Ukrainians. It is also an insulting to a nation that proportionally lost almost the greatest number of people fighting the German Nazism in the Second World War.

To clarify the matters, yes, as could be expected, there were all sorts of radicals taking part in the Ukrainian revolution; left-wing, right-wing, anarchists, punks and hippies, football fans and veterans of the Soviet Afghan war, who happened to be united by the same cause. However, radicals constituted a minority force in the events in Kiev, and had zero influence on politics after the revolution. Moreover, all political parties that were suspected in embracing nationalism subsequently lost the general elections.

(There were also groups of hired provocateurs, paid by former president and his friends, who tried to provoke clashes with the police, providing a justification of police brutality and posing with Nazi symbols for the cameramen of Russian state TV channels.)

On the 22nd of February Russia used a new weapon in its quest to destroy Ukraine. In addition to an already accomplished aggression in Crimea and an ongoing invasion of Donbas, it is now terrorism. A bomb planted in the snow exploded in the face of a peaceful demonstration. The explosion claimed four victims deaths already and many wounded who are now fighting for life: a university lecturer in physics, and a colonel of police died on the spot, an 18 year old student and a 15 year old kid died later in the hospital. If it was not for a car that passed nearby and shielded the crowd, the number of victims would have been much greater.

Shocking as this terror attack was (Ukraine had never experienced terrorism before), even more depressing were the comments from Russians on the social media. They rejoiced, gloated and congratulated the “partisans” for killing Ukrainian Nazis, deploring that the victims were too few. Assuming that those were real people behind the comments, one has to congratulate the Russian television: its work of dehumanizing the Ukrainians has been thoroughly accomplished. With one unintended consequence: while dehumanizing the others, they have dehumanized themselves.

Update: Eight people arrested in Spain for fighting at Russian side in Ukraine. The were left activists, and they went to fight in the colonialist aggressive war that Russian right-wing dictatorship is conducting in Ukraine. The propaganda works.