...apparently you're ashamed of your "news" sources, so I'm Googling. Here is a defining article:
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Putin's claim of fighting against Ukraine 'neo-Nazis' distorts history, scholars say
Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked World War II to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine, saying in televised remarks last week that his offensive aimed to "denazify" the country — whose democratically elected president is Jewish, and lost relatives in the Holocaust.
"The purpose of this operation is to protect people who for eight years now have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime," he said, according to an English translation from the Russian Mission in Geneva. "To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation."
Russian officials have continued to employ that rhetoric in recent days.
Russia's Foreign Ministry last week accused Western countries of ignoring what it called war crimes in Ukraine, saying their silence "encouraged the onset of neo-Nazism and Russophobia." Russia's envoy to the United Nations reiterated over the weekend that it is carrying out "a special military operation against nationalists to protect the people of Donbass, ensure denazification and demilitarisation."
And Putin has accused "Banderites and neo-Nazis" of putting up heavy weapons and using human shields in Ukrainian cities. Banderites is a term used — often pejoratively — to describe followers of controversial Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, and Ukrainian nationalists in general.
The Russian invasion, and the language of "denazification" as a perceived pretext for it, quickly drew backlash from many world leaders, onlookers and experts alike.
Criticisms of Russia's perceived hypocrisy grew even louder on Tuesday, when Russian strikes hit a memorial to Babyn Yar — the site where Nazis killed tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.
Ukraine's official Twitter account posted a cartoon of Putin and Adolf Hitler gazing lovingly into each others' eyes, writing that "This is not a 'meme,' but our and your reality right now." The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others, said Putin "misrepresented and misappropriated Holocaust history."
A lengthy list of historians signed a letter condemning the Russian government's "cynical abuse of the term genocide, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, and the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression."
They pointed to a broader pattern of Russian propaganda frequently painting Ukraine's elected leaders as "Nazis and fascists oppressing the local ethnic Russian population, which it claims needs to be liberated."
And while Ukraine has right-wing extremists, they add, that does not justify Russia's aggression and mischaracterization.
Europe
How Ukraine's history differs from Putin's version
Putin's language is offensive and factually wrong, several experts explain to NPR.
It's a harmful distortion and dilution of history, they say, even though many people appear not to be buying it this time around.
Laura Jockusch, a professor of Holocaust studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, told NPR over email that Putin's claims about the Ukrainian army allegedly perpetrating a genocide against Russians in the Donbas region are completely unfounded, but politically useful to him.
"Putin has been repeating this 'genocide' myth for several years and nobody in the West seems to have listened until now," she says. "There is no 'genocide,' not even an 'ethnic cleansing' perpetrated by the Ukraine against ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in the Ukraine. It is a fiction that is used by Putin to justify his war of aggression on the Ukraine." "
