Both sides of the War in Ukraine use fascism in various ways to serve their own ends. Ukraine is not a fascist or Nazi state in any reasonable sense (it is a bourgeois national state, and even has a Jewish president), but it uses the influential Ukrainian fascist movement to its own ends. The Ukrainian National Guard contains an explicitly Nazi unit, the Azov Battalion (which has actually grown into a regiment). Azov ist paramilitary organization during the 2014 protests that brought down the Yanukovych government. It was incorporated into the official National Guard, which is the Ukrainian gendarmerie, when the pro-NATO regime was constituted. It continues to do the state’s dirty work in Eastern Ukraine, while appealing to the fascism, latent or explicit, that permeates Ukrainian nationalism.

Russia uses the same strategy. There are significant fascist and Nazi elements in contemporary Russian nationalism, along with a current of antisemitism that has survived since the Tsarist period. Russia also provides clandestine support to fascist movements in other countries in order to destabilize them. At the same time, the Russian government would never be caught taking explicitly fascistic positions because postwar Russian imperialism is tied up in the victory against the Nazis.

The United States is, of course, no stranger to supporting fascist movements as the situation requires. Following the Maidan protests in 2014, it promoted every chauvinistic nationalist movement that could possibly take a pro-US slant. US journalists praise White Army pogromists and Nazi collaborators as Ukrainian national heroes. The US government previously provided weapons to the Azov Battalion, and has just decided to do so again. Yet the US government cannot possibly take a pro-fascist position for the same reason as the Russian government: the victory against Nazi Germany in WW2 is central to US imperialism.

Every player in the conflict uses fascist and Nazi comparisons to its own advantage. The Ukrainian government and its supporters compare the Russian state in 2022 to the Nazi state in 1938 (even as they use their own fascist regiment against the Russians). The United States and the rest of NATO use the same comparison to justify their role in escalating the conflict. Some have explicitly made comparisons to the Munich Agreement of 1938, stating that NATO cannot "appease" the Russians like the Allies appeased Hitler. On the other side of the conflict (to the extent that any bourgeois war has distinct sides), the Russian state attempts to justify its invasion of Ukraine under the pretext of "denazifying" the country and stopping a "genocide" of Russian speakers in Ukraine (entirely fictional, of course).

This propaganda regarding fascism is absurd. There is really no fascist threat in Europe in 2022: fascism is already here, always hidden and bred by democracy. The Ukrainian, Russian, and US bourgeoisies do not need the tool of fascism now because the proletariat is weak. They only talk about fascism now because it is a convenient way to justify imperialism – any imperialism, as it turns out. Even German rearmament can now be justified by the fascist menace. O tempora, o mores!.