A senior Russian lawmaker who has participated in negotiations surrounding the ongoing war in Ukraine has accused Kyiv and its international supporters of promoting a kind of new fascism—and argued that it was Moscow’s duty to battle it.
The allegations, widely dismissed in the West, speak to a broader battle of narratives imbued with rival ideologies that surround the volatile conflict in Eastern Europe, setting the warring parties even further apart from reaching a potential solution.
Leonid Slutsky, who serves as chair of the International Affairs Committee of Russia’s lower house of parliament and head of the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party, has been a fervent supporter of what President Vladimir Putin called a “special military operation” launched against Ukraine in February 2022. The conflict has since been termed an “illegal,” “unprovoked” and “unjustified” invasion by the United States and other backers of Ukraine.
But Slutsky, whom Putin awarded an Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 3rd Class last month, drew a comparison to the initial ideological feud that erupted between the nascent Soviet Union and the West prior to World War II to discuss the present circumstances.
VYACHESLAV PROKOFYEV/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images
“The anti-Russian fascist project was launched immediately after the end of the First World War,” Slutsky said in comments shared with Newsweek. “The economy of Anglo-Saxons as inventors of the ‘deep-rooted fascism’ did not allow starting a direct contact war with Russia. Therefore, the diplomacy of fascism set sights on implementation of the first phase of the destruction of Russia—isolation.”
While the Soviet Union would later join the United Kingdom, the U.S. and other Allied Powers against Nazi Germany, the leadup to the devastating conflict was mired in complex diplomatic and economic relationships that at times saw both Western and Soviet materials serve to fuel the rise of Adolf Hitler’s war machine. Today, Slutsky argued that leading members of the Group of Seven (G7), formerly the G8 before Russia’s 2014 expulsion over its disputed annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and support for separatist rebels in Ukraine, were making the same mistake.
“Is it any secret to us by now how Ukraine has been prepared for war? And what technologies are our ‘partners’ in the G7 ready to kindly offer to their ‘new Hitler’?” Slutsky asked rhetorically. “As a result, the Ukrainian ‘Reich’ received at its disposal everything from satellite constellations up to modern tanks.”
Newsweek has reached out to the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry for comment.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly rejected any ties to Nazism and has said that members of his family, which includes Jewish heritage, were killed during the Holocaust. His efforts to resist Russia’s incursion have won him widespread support among Western countries, including a growing amount of economic and military assistance. But in offering such aid, Slutsky said the U.S. and its allies were only prolonging the conflict and reaping the benefits.
“Nowadays is there anybody in Washington who counts Ukrainian soldiers killed in action? There is nobody,” Slutsky said. “They count money. They assess profits from new contracts for HIMARS, F-16s fighters and new tanks.”
Slutsky argued that the “modern-day fascism” he attributed to Ukraine and its supporters eschewed the familiar symbols of Nazi Germany and instead took on new aesthetics, some of which are more commonly associated with the modern left and liberalism. The Russian lawmaker alleged that such “deep-rooted fascism…corrupts young people through social networks, imposes LGBT narratives, and holds elite by the throat through corrupt accounts in cryptocurrencies, through dual or triple citizenship.”
“Fascism is a unique tool for the Anglo-Saxon struggle against Russia,” Slutsky said. “It was invented for the purpose of restraining growth of the long-term political and economic influence of the Russian civilization, notably on the European continent.”
The U.S. has vehemently sought to dispel this narrative, viewing it as mere propaganda drawn up to rally support for Russia’s war effort.
Reached for comment, a U.S. State Department spokesperson told Newsweek that “those allegations are total nonsense and are part of a cynical and pernicious disinformation campaign in which Russian government mouthpieces label those who disagree with its twisted version of history as Nazis or Nazi sympathizers.”
Washington has especially taken issue with Putin’s calls for the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine that, along with seeking to “demilitarize” the neighboring nation, served as the initial justification for the conflict.
“It is particularly horrifying that Vladimir Putin is trying to justify his unprovoked war against Ukraine by distorting and misappropriating Holocaust history,” the State Department spokesperson said. “Saying that today’s democratic Ukraine needs to be ‘denazified’ is an insult to all those who suffered under the Nazi regime in Ukraine and elsewhere.
“Such distortion erodes understanding of the Holocaust, disrespects its legacy, and undermines contemporary global efforts to prevent mass atrocities so that another Holocaust can never again occur,” the spokesperson added.
The State Department spokesperson also accused Moscow of shifting its own narrative of the conflict over time and reiterated Washington’s lasting support for Kyiv, both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.
“The Kremlin has worked hard to convince people that this war is justified—and their story has shifted a lot,” the State Department spokesperson said. “First, they tried to convince people that Ukraine was full of Nazis, then they tried to say that Ukraine was getting ready to attack them, then that NATO was getting ready to attack them. All of this is absolute nonsense.
“The United States will continue to support Ukraine for as long as it takes,” the spokesperson added, “so Ukraine can continue to defend itself and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table when the time comes.”
MAXIM GUCHEK/BELTA/AFP/Getty Images
Slutsky is one of the few to have played a direct role in Russia-Ukraine negotiations that began just weeks into the conflict, first in Belarus and later in Türkiye. The rival delegations would blame one another for the collapse of peace talks.
However, Slutsky did find success when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan later brought both parties together alongside the United Nations to establish a Black Sea Corridor allowing the continued export of grain to meet the desperate demands of developing nations. This deal has also been subject to scrutiny as Kyiv and Moscow fail to find any common ground to foster further direct dialogue, even amid pushes by China and a group of African leaders.
Slutsky has previously called for the “unconditional capitulation” of Ukraine in order to restart peace talks and has rejected any agreement that would entail Russia ceding control over four partially occupied territories that it annexed in an internationally unrecognized referendum held last September. U.S. President Joe Biden‘s administration has stipulated that such steps, along with the total withdrawal of Russian troops, are necessary to begin negotiations.
In addition to criticizing Washington, Slutsky also took aim at London in his latest remarks, alleging that the U.K. had maintained its imperial designs and was seeking to constrain a resource-rich Russia from realizing its true potential through hostile economic and political endeavors.
“Through the efforts of the fascist Anglo-Saxon elite, Russia has been immersed in a permanent crisis that has been lingering for more than a century,” Slutsky said. “Moreover, this is a good long-term ‘project’ from their point of view.
“The disruption and isolation of Russia that are taking place today (cancel culture, Russophobia, which are being translated into PR projects and international fashion) are part of a great fascist ressentiment and revenge,” Slutsky said. “Moreover, this is not just a ‘cancellation,’ but an appropriation of our Motherland heritage.”
Reached for comment, the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office referred Newsweek to select comments made by Foreign Secretary James Clever during a press conference earlier this month in Kyiv.
“As Ukraine continues its sustained fightback against Russia, I was able to see for myself the true horrors and devastation of what Russia has wreaked on this sovereign state,” the top U.K. diplomat said.
“Forcibly deporting children, razing cities like Bakhmut, Izium and Mariupol to the ground and committing atrocities are not the acts of a responsible international state,” he added. “They are the actions of a hostile regime that is in violation of the UN Charter.”
Clever declared that “Ukraine will win this war and can count on our support.”
Still, Slutsky linked the approach to Russia by the U.K. and other Western nations to the historic looting of indigenous treasures and the destruction of societies by colonial powers in Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas. He described fascism as a byproduct of such colonial behaviors, as well as Calvinist Protestant strains of Christianity, including that of the U.S. in its own ethnic cleansing of Native Americans in past centuries and again in today’s Western-led sanctions campaign against Moscow.
“The global Anglo-Saxon world is looking for opportunities to exclude the peoples of Russia from the global resource distribution system,” Slutsky said. “After all, Russia, among other things, possesses the largest ecological capacity in the world. The largest volume of economic capacity is concentrated in our country.”
ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP/Getty Images
Slutsky and his own party have also been accused of promoting far-right and ultranationalist ideologies in Russia.
Western media reports of his speech last August at the funeral of Darya Dugina, the assassinated daughter of ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, in which Slutsky declared, “One country, one president, one victory! And to Dasha, the kingdom of heaven!”, drew comparisons to the infamous Nazi slogan, “‘One people, one Reich, one Führer.”
Describing his party’s ethos, however, Slutsky told Newsweek, “The Liberal Democratic Party considers the history of fascism precisely as the struggle between fascism and Russia.
“The antifascist approach of the Liberal Democratic Party is a struggle for the preservation of the Russian state itself,” Slutsky said. “But history is a complex construction of junctions and consequences.”
Slutsky argued that the “deep-rooted fascism” that was “born in the 20th and 21st century” has “no other goal than the capture, enslavement, division and isolation of Russia—these are different stages of a single process.
“Now the isolation phase is being implemented,” Slutsky said. “Therefore, in the modern world, Russia simply needs a huge army. After all, we have many things to protect and we know whom to protect them from.”
He accused Western powers of seeking to “replace the role of real values” and “replace the role of traditions” with “transhumanism and the power of corporations, the hype around the omnipotence of IT, the hype around the unlimited superiority of artificial intelligence.
“Destroying traditions, the West relies on scientific and technological progress, which has become a weapon,” Slutsky said. “This weapon is aimed at us in order to prove to ourselves that we do not have the right to possess this land, and this territory.”
Using the platform of his party, Slutsky called for vast improvements in Russia’s development in order to counter such alleged campaigns being waged against the country.
“We, in the Liberal Democratic Party, declare that it is necessary to clearly understand where Russia is lagging behind today; and it is necessary to take phenomenally fast decisive steps in order to catch up with scientific and technological progress,” Slutsky said. “Otherwise, the occupation of Russia, if not physical, then technological and financial, will become easier. We cannot allow this to happen.
“The war is not waged in Artemovsk and Melitopol, or any other specific city,” he added. “We are fighting this war for Russia; its history, for our present, and our future.”
