An image recently shared on social media depicts the family of Nazi propagnad chief, Josef Goebbles, his wife Magda and their children with Adolf Hitler. The grandmother of Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland is not pictured.
Falsely tagged images like this one are created to support ongoing Russian disinformation operations that seeks to discredit the Canadian Deputy PM based on her Ukrainian heritage.
In February 2022, Vladimir Putin justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a campaign to “de-Nazify” the country. However, Ukraine’s President is Jewish and far-right parties are not represented in Ukraine’s parliament.
During the Cold War, Moscow regularly accused those critical of Russia’s Soviet era government and who fought and advocated for the freedom of nations occupied by the Soviets, as “fascists”. This tactical narrative has been repurposed and adopted by the Putin regime to marginalize and dehumanize its adversaries – including the Ukrainian and Central and Eastern European communities in Canada.
In 2017, the Russian Embassy in Canada actively promoted a narrative that accused Canada’s then foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland of being a Nazi sympathizer. That same narrative was reintroduced a few weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Canada’s Deputy PM was photographed behind a Ukrainian scarf with the words “Slava Ukraini” (glory to Ukraine) embroidered on it.
Canadian political partisans have unfortunately -knowingly and unknowingly- exploited and amplified these narratives for domestic political advantage. Pro-authoritarian/pro-Kremlin activists on the extreme left and right have also exploited these narratives to discredit critics of the Russian government and those who support human rights and democracy in Russia.
CBC Report About Russian “neo-Nazi” Disinformation
