“We are extremely surprised by the reaction of ‘Yad Vashem’ – Russia demands ‘to prevent the pandemic of fascism'”

In the Russian propaganda TASS published an “interview” with the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova, timed to April 19 — a new Russian “memorial date” – “Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People“. The very presentation of this conversation shows that it is not just about history, not about a scientific discussion, and not about an honest conversation about the tragedy of World War II. Before the reader is a political text in which memory, victims, the Holocaust, the fate of the peoples of the USSR, Ukraine, Europe, and even Israel are drawn into a single propaganda construct beneficial to Moscow.

We will not retell the “article” itself – those interested can find it themselves – the internet still works there (for how long?).

For the Israeli audience, this material is especially important not only because Israel and “Yad Vashem” are directly mentioned in the interview. More importantly, the Russian regime is once again trying to place itself at the center of the global conversation about memory, morality, and the victims of Nazism, while simultaneously using this moral capital to justify the current war against Ukraine. That is why such an interview should be read not as a historical document, but as an example of how the Russian aggressor regime masks political technology as care for memory.

What makes the TASS interview dangerous for understanding history

On the surface, everything looks almost impeccable. Zakharova talks about the dead, about monuments, about rewriting history, about the victims of Hitlerism, about the need to preserve the truth about the war. For an unprepared reader, this may even sound convincing: who would argue that the memory of millions of killed should be preserved.

But this is where the main manipulation begins.

The problem is not that Russia remembers the victims of World War II. The problem is that the Kremlin system has long ceased to remember them for the sake of memory. It uses them for power, for legitimizing its own aggression, for moral blackmail of opponents, and to present any criticism of Russian foreign policy in advance almost as complicity in “rewriting history” or even in a new “fascism”.

This is the key to understanding the entire construct. When the state talks about the dead, it is always important to see what it does to the living. In this case, it is not memory that becomes alive, but ideology.

Memory as a monopoly, not as a dialogue

Zakharova builds a position as if there is only one permissible version of the history of World War II, and it is modern Russia that has the exclusive right to be its guardian. All other approaches — Eastern European, Ukrainian, Baltic, Western, Jewish, Israeli, academic, comparative — in such a scheme automatically become either secondary, or suspicious, or directly hostile.

This is an extremely dangerous technique. Historical memory in the real world is complex. It does not have to be the same in Kyiv, Haifa, Warsaw, Berlin, Vilnius, or Prague. Each country has its own experience of war, occupation, resistance, salvation, collaboration, genocide, and liberation. But propaganda does not tolerate complexity. It needs a vertical. In this vertical, Moscow is the top, and everyone else must either agree or be recorded in the camp of “distorters of truth”.

Sacralization of one’s own version of history

Another noticeable technique is the constant sacralization of the topic. The interview uses formulas about “sacred duty”, “sacred memory”, “heroes”, “victorious people”, “historical mission”. At first glance, this looks like patriotic language. In fact, it is a way to take the conversation out of the realm of arguments into the realm of emotional taboo.

When the topic is presented as sacred, it becomes psychologically more difficult to argue with the official interpretation. Then the dissenter is no longer just a historian with a different point of view and not a journalist asking an uncomfortable question. He can be morally humiliated even before the dispute begins: presented as insensitive, ungrateful, almost a desecrator of memory.

For the Russian aggressor regime, this is an ideal scheme. Where there are not enough facts, the sacred tone is turned on. Where there is no evidence, there is resentment on behalf of the dead.

How the Kremlin replaces history with politics

The central manipulation of the interview is that the conversation about World War II gradually turns into a conversation about Moscow’s current geopolitical goals. And this transition is made not by chance, but very precisely.

First, the reader is immersed in a heavy emotional frame: victims, monuments, exhumations, concentration camps, losses, forgotten dead, demolished memorials. Then into this same frame begin to weave the European Union, NATO, Eastern Europe, Ukraine, international structures, and later — even modern political struggle. As a result, the reader develops the desired propaganda connection: if Russia speaks on behalf of the memory of the war, then Russia’s current opponents automatically find themselves on the other side of the moral line.

This is a crude but effective glue.

False binary: either with Moscow or with falsifiers

In the interview, there is almost no space left for normal historical debate. The logic is built as if the world is divided into only two camps.

In the first — Russia, truth, memory, heroes, liberation, fight against Nazism.

In the second — those who demolish monuments, rewrite textbooks, belittle the victims of the USSR, and in the future supposedly push the world towards a “pandemic of fascism”.

But the real world is arranged differently.

One can recognize the colossal contribution of the USSR to the defeat of Nazi Germany and at the same time disagree with modern Russian propaganda. One can condemn the destruction of graves and at the same time remind of Soviet repressions. One can honor the memory of Red Army soldiers and at the same time understand that for many peoples of Eastern Europe, 1945 meant not only liberation from Nazism but also a transition to new control.

It is this complexity that the Kremlin machine does not need. It needs a simple moral board: here is good, there is evil. And since good today is Russia, any criticism of the war against Ukraine almost turns into an act of historical betrayal.

Substitution of terms and emotional glue

One of the most noticeable methods in the interview is the constant mixing of different concepts. There are “fascism”, “Nazism”, “Hitlerism”, “revanchism”, “rewriting history”, “Russophobia”, EU policy, NATO policy, and memory of the war. For an academic conversation, this is unacceptable because we are talking about different phenomena, different eras, and different levels of analysis.

But for propaganda, such mixing is extremely convenient.

If everything is put together in one emotional package, then the desired effect can be achieved: a person who argues with Moscow about the interpretation of the Soviet past begins to stand in the eyes of the audience somewhere near those who justify historical evil. This is not analysis. This is a psychological operation.

Why the topic of “genocide of the Soviet people” is presented right now

A special place in the interview is occupied by the formula promoted by Moscow about the “genocide of the Soviet people”. It is presented as an almost indisputable legal and moral given, around which supposedly both internal and international work has already been built.

For the Israeli reader, there is an important nuance here.

The question is not whether there were mass crimes by the Nazis against the civilian population of the USSR. They were, and their monstrous scale has long been proven. The question is different: why is the Russian government so aggressively and persistently trying to frame this in a new political-symbolic framework, and with international claims, right now.

The answer lies on the surface. The Kremlin needs not just a term. It needs a moral resource. It needs to create its own superframe of victimhood, around which a new diplomatic and ideological architecture can be built. The more actively Russia wages war against Ukraine, the more it needs to talk not about its own strikes, occupation, destruction, and deportations, but about its own historical sufferings.

That is why the conversation about the past here works as a smokescreen for the present.

Legalization without a full legal discussion

Another technique is to give the new formula the appearance of legal completeness. The interview suggests that everything has already been proven, that the courts and law enforcement agencies have worked, that international work is underway, that the issue is almost closed. Such language is needed to make the political decision look like an objective legal outcome.

But legal categories do not work on the principle of a television announcement.

When the state first politically formulates the desired narrative, then consolidates it through its own institutions, and then presents it to the world as an undeniable legal truth, this is no longer science and not international law. This is the state production of a convenient reality.

Ukraine in this interview is not a topic, but a target

Although the conversation is formally about World War II, Ukraine is present in the interview as a constant hidden object of attack. Sometimes directly, sometimes through hints, sometimes through constructions about “revanchism”, “rewriting history”, “betrayal of the memory of ancestors” and “ungrateful descendants”.

This is a very characteristic technique of the Russian aggressor regime.

Modern Ukraine is not just politically criticized. It is morally discredited through a historical line. The reader is instilled with the idea that Ukrainian independence, Ukrainian memory, Ukrainian interpretation of the war, and Ukrainian resistance to Moscow are almost apostasy from the common sacred history.

Thus, a pseudo-moral foundation for aggression is created.

If Ukraine is declared a space of historical betrayal, then the war against it is presented not as a war of an empire against a neighbor, but as some continuation of the old struggle with the “wrong” historical force. This is especially cynical precisely because in reality Russia is attacking a country that is today defending itself from invasion, and not engaging in “rehabilitation of Nazism” in the sense attributed to it by Kremlin propaganda.

Hereditary guilt as a tool of demonization

It is especially noticeable how the motif of grandfathers and great-grandfathers works in the interview. It is needed to translate modern politics into the field of moral inheritance. As if the ancestors fought together, and the descendants now seem to have betrayed their memory.

This is a strong emotional scheme, but historically and politically it is dishonest.

The memory of the war is not passed on as an eternal obligation to support the current foreign policy of Moscow. Descendants are not obliged to consider the Russian state the sole heir of Victory. Moreover, they are not obliged to agree that the right to speak about the victim automatically gives the right to wage a predatory war today.

Israel, “Yad Vashem” and hidden pressure through the Holocaust theme

One of the most important fragments for NAnovosti is the block concerning Israel and the reaction of “Yad Vashem”. Here, Russian diplomatic rhetoric becomes especially revealing.

On the one hand, Zakharova says that Moscow was “extremely surprised” by the reaction of “Yad Vashem”. On the other hand, she tries to soften the wording, declares readiness for joint work, coordination of efforts, cooperation with Israeli colleagues in preserving the memory of World War II.

In diplomatic language, this looks moderate. Politically, it is an attempt to apply soft pressure.

Russia shows: we want Israeli institutions not to interfere with the new Russian framework on the “genocide of the Soviet people”, and even better — not to enter into open contradiction with it. It is important for Moscow that its own historical construct is not publicly problematized against the backdrop of the Israeli memorial tradition, where there are much stricter criteria for working with the theme of the Shoah, mass destruction, and the uniqueness of the Nazi “project”.

Leaning on the moral weight of the Holocaust

This is perhaps one of the most sensitive elements of the entire interview.

When Moscow reminds of its role in resolutions dedicated to the Holocaust, when it emphasizes that it “never divided victims”, when it offers joint work on memory, it is not just saying the right diplomatic words. It is trying to integrate its own state concept into the same moral register in which the memory of the Shoah exists in the world.

For Israel, this is a fundamentally important point.

The memory of the Holocaust is not a decoration for foreign policy maneuvers. It is a uniquely documented catastrophe, having its own historical, legal, philosophical, and moral scale.

When the Russian aggressor regime seeks to attach its current political construct to this memory, it solves two tasks at once: it raises the moral status of its own rhetoric and makes any criticism of this rhetoric more inconvenient.

That is why the reaction of Israeli structures to such attempts has not only academic but also moral significance.

Why for the Israeli audience this interview cannot be perceived neutrally

Israel is especially sensitive to any attempts to instrumentalize memory — to use it as a political tool. The history of the Jewish people has paid too high a price for words about genocide, destruction, memory, and moral responsibility to be used freely and without verification.

Therefore, it is important for the Israeli reader to see that in the TASS interview it is not just about differences in views between countries. It is about an attempt by a regime waging war against Ukraine to take control of the very language of historical morality.

This is dangerous for several reasons.

Firstly, because it erases the boundary between real memory and state cult.

Secondly, because the theme of anti-Nazism turns into a screen for modern aggression.

Thirdly, because Israel in such a scenario is wanted to be used as an important element of legitimation: if Israeli institutions do not object too sharply, Moscow can interpret this as tacit recognition of its own framework.

It is in this place that NAnovosti — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency sees one of the most dangerous sides of such publications. Under the guise of talking about the dead, Russian propaganda tries to control the living: their emotions, historical memory, diplomatic reactions, and moral instincts.

The main manipulations of the interview — briefly and to the point

If the entire text is reduced to a set of techniques, the following picture emerges.

Russia appropriates the exclusive right to speak on behalf of historical truth.

The memory of the victims is used as a moral shield against criticism of the current Kremlin policy.

The historical debate is replaced by a division into “ours” and “almost fascists”.

Ukraine is demonized through the myth of betrayal of common memory.

Europe is presented not as a space of complex debate about the past, but as a factory of conscious lies.

Israel is gently drawn into the desired Moscow construct through the theme of common memory and the Holocaust.

Legal categories are presented as already ready political goods.

And finally, this entire system works towards one main goal: to make the audience look not at the current crimes of the Russian aggressor regime, but at its carefully edited image as a “defender of historical truth”.

What is important to say directly

The memory of World War II cannot be privatized by a state that itself uses historical language to justify war, occupation, and the destruction of a neighboring country. Millions of dead cannot be turned into a rhetorical resource for new adventures. One cannot agree that the one who speaks the loudest about the victims of the past automatically receives a moral indulgence in the present.

That is why the interview published in TASS should be read harshly, soberly, and without self-deception.

This is not the protection of memory. This is an attempt to subordinate memory to state violence.

This is not a fight against falsification. This is a fight for monopoly on interpretation.

This is not respect for the victims. This is exploitation of the victims.

And this is not just a conversation about the past. This is one of the ways in which the Russian aggressor regime tries to justify its current war against Ukraine, pressure Europe, and cautiously push Israel in one of the most sensitive moral spaces of modernity.

Conclusion for Israel and the Jewish audience

For Israel, where the memory of the Shoah is not an abstract topic, but part of the national, family, and civilizational experience, such texts should be viewed with particular caution. Where the state begins to manage memory too actively, there is almost always a temptation to turn tragedy into an instrument of influence.

This is exactly what Moscow is doing today.

It does not just want to remember. It wants to control how others remember.

It does not just want to argue about the past. It wants to control the moral language of the present through the past.

And therefore, the response to such texts should not be emotional, but principled: the memory of the war belongs not to the aggressor, but to history; the memory of the victims belongs not to propaganda, but to conscience; and the right to speak about tragedy does not give the right to kill today.