HispanicRedneck
Expert
They are not real natsocs.Roger that. We'll just carpet bomb the Ukrainian Nazi lovers and get the conflict over with. No nukes. They're Nazis! Real Nazis! Why is any freedom loving red blooded American sticking up for them?! Because the TV said to?!
They are just banderists. Ukrainian ultranatisalists that despite coopting some runes and symbols have very little ideological ground with actual nazis. Their motivation is mostly a hatred of russians, and that ukraine is a real country. They have plenty of jewish allies and members, a no no for natsocs. Their leader went to the wall of wailing in jerusalem to pay respects. Truly an unrepentant nazi
Stephan Bandera was just a nationalist freedom fighter/terrorist that fought against nazis, poles and soviets during different periods of time, collaborating with the germans during the invasion as a way of advancing his cause. Fun fact, during the invasion, as soon as he started screeching for an independent ukraine, the germans threw him in jail and let him rot there until 1944. Then, as the soviet armies flooded west, they released Bandera in the hopes that he would cause troubles to the advancing soviets and delay them.
This he did, forming a terrorist/guerrilla unit that fought the soviet terror with terror of its own, including thousands of murders, ethnic cleansing and assorted criminal activities. Meanwhile Bandera himself ran and hid in Western europe, where he was assassinated by KGB agents in 1959. As many other nazi collaborators in eastern europe, they were not true nazi believers (and the nazis considered them slavic subhumans), but rather the enemy of my enemy is my friend type of deal.
In that context, what the russians mean by denazifiying ukraine is de-banderizing ukraine. Removing this ultranationalist element that is extremely hostile not only to the russian federation, but to ethnic russians that make up a sizeable percentage of the ukrainian population. Ukraine is a corrupt shithole that had government sponsored death squads running around dissapearing anyone not banderist enough, and thst are currently documented as using civilians as human shields to try and stop the russian advance.
But hey, they are useful idiots to throw into the meatgrinder, giving the russians trouble via fanatical resistance and not expecting to survive. Azov are not natsocs, they are banderists, ultranationalists with an ad-hoc grouping of ideologies under a bigger umbrella