When Russian soldiers invaded Lubyanka, a village near the ravaged Kyiv suburb of Bucha, the Russians forced all the men to assemble in a central square. Then the invaders demanded that the Nazis step forward.
“The men laughed,” I was told by Iryna Rayko, a Ukrainian American whose sister in Lubyanka recently informed her by phone of the details. “They said, ‘There are no Nazis here, we are just Ukrainians who love our country.’”
Luckily none of these men were murdered in the square in February. But the Russian military’s fixation on rooting out “Nazis” reflects the Big Lie Vladimir Putin tells his people to justify the Ukraine war. He insists that Ukraine is led by Nazis — backed by the United States and NATO — and that the country is riddled with Nazi sympathizers.
