Putin's 'Chilling' Language Raises Alarms

Vladimir Putin's military is pressing its advance on Ukraine, and Putin himself is ramping up his related rhetoric. A number of stories are parsing his language:

• Nazis: In a New York Times analysis, Anton Troianovski digs into why Putin keeps saying he must "de-Nazify" Ukraine and keeps invoking the "Nazi" theme. Given that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is himself Jewish and lost family in the Holocaust, it's an odd stretch. But it "shows how Mr. Putin is trying to use stereotypes, distorted reality and his country’s lingering World War II trauma to justify his invasion of Ukraine," writes Troianovski. The heart of it: "The Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany remains perhaps the single most powerful element of a unifying national identity," and Putin hopes to capitalize on it. In this view, modern Nazis are anti-Russian instead of anti-Jewish. Read the full piece.
• Nazis, II: NPR also digs into the Nazi references and speaks to a number of historians who explain why "Putin's language is offensive and factually wrong." The view of José Casanova, a professor emeritus of sociology at Georgetown University: "And now we see [Russia is] doing it every time the Ukrainians try to establish a democratic society, they try to say that those are Nazis," he says. "You need to dehumanize the other before you are going to murder them, and this is what's happening now."

• Stalinesque: It's not just Putin's references to Nazis drawing attention. In an angry speech this week, he declared that "the Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths—spit them out on the pavement." An AP analysis finds that it's "language that recalls the rhetoric from Josef Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s," and it suggests that sweeping repression is in store for those who dare to speak out against the Kremlin.
• Stalinesque, II: At Slate, Fred Kaplan writes that the speech was "chilling," adding that Putin "seemed to embrace his inner Josef Stalin." Kaplan draws parallels between Putin's "venomous xenophobia" and Stalin's rhetoric. The latter warned of "rootless cosmopolitanism," and Putin is treading similar territory. That Putin could unleash the same horrors as Stalin might seem unthinkable, but then this Ukraine war seemed unthinkable not too long ago. "Will someone—perhaps among the newly defunded oligarchs, the hung-out-to-dry-and-die military officers, or, who knows, the masses of protesters—rise to the occasion and oust this man?" writes Kaplan. "That is the question of the moment."

(More Vladimir Putin stories.)