Russia Claims It's Invading Ukraine To Fight 'Nazis' & Ukraine's President Says That's BS

Russia is throwing out a lot of reasons for its invasion of Ukraine, but one of them sounds particularly odd in 2022.

According to the Kremlin, Russia is going into Ukraine to fight "Nazis."

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion with a speech on Thursday, in which he declared that one of his goals is the "demilitarization and de-Nazification" of the country.

Putin also described Ukraine as a country run by "neo-Nazis," after claiming without evidence that there's a "genocide" going on against pro-Russian separatists. He made several references to World War II throughout the speech.

Speaking just before Russia launched its attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suggested that the idea he'd be running a neo-Nazi government is absurd. He blamed the idea on Russian propaganda, which has reportedly been cranking out false videos and reports about Ukrainian attacks on Russians.

"The Ukraine on your news and Ukraine in real life are two completely different countries," Zelensky said in a speech in Russian, as translated by Politico.

"You are told we are Nazis. But could a people who lost more than 8 million lives in the battle against Nazism support Nazism?"

Zelensky then pointed out that his grandfather fought against the Nazis in World War II. He has also previously mentioned that three of his great-uncles died in the Holocaust and that he himself is Jewish.

"How can I be a Nazi?" he asked.

The Ukrainian president later described Russia as "evil" on Twitter and compared its actions to those of Nazi Germany.

Ukraine had some neo-Nazi sympathizers on its side in the fight for Crimea in 2014, but there's no evidence that those guys are now running the country, NBC News reports.

Zelensky was democratically elected in 2019, and his government has been trying to tie itself more closely to Western democracies and the NATO defensive pact.

Anthony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, warned the United Nations in a speech last week that Putin might invent some excuses to invade Ukraine.

"Russia plans to manufacture a pretext for its attack," he said in the speech. "Russia may describe this event as ethnic cleansing or a genocide, making a mockery of a concept that we in this chamber do not take lightly."

Blinken also warned that Russia's goal would be to target Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital with a population of 2.8 million people.

Ukraine's outspoken Twitter account fired back at Putin after the start of the invasion, by sharing a cartoon of Adolf Hitler looking proudly at Putin.

"This is not a 'meme,' but our and your reality right now," it wrote.