The CIA spent the postwar years doing all kinds of gross things, one of which was trying to move as many nazis to Ukraine as possible, with the specific aim of creating a fascist uprising in the USSR and possibly a Ukrainian fascist break-away state. They accelerated this program after the USSR coup, and the result is a modern Ukrainian state with outright neo-nazis in positions of power over the police, cities, and entire government. This is also why Ukraine doesn't bother to do the hilariously simple trick of just telling their troops to stop wearing white nationalist, nazi patches, or perhaps suggesting to volunteers using assumed names to stop picking "Adolf" or "Dirlewanger" or whatever - they are all part of an explicitly fascist national project.

IMO they publish all these pictures on purpose as part of a wider campaign to normalize nazism.

Ukrainian fascists are the commandos of the war and have people sympathetic to them all up the chain. They are provided with a lot of power on the ground and this includes the production of propaganda.

You see a lot of Nazi imagery because (1) there are indeed a lot of Ukrainian fascists in the military and (2) the Ukrainian fascists are the ones creating the photo ops.

Liberals are first and foremost ignorant and most don't even notice or recognize sonnenrads or whatever most of the time. And when it's pointed out, they become defensive, as this has been their rah-rah nationalist moment, the first war in a long time they feel they can outwardly support. Acknowledging that they're supporting Nazis creates cognitive dissonance that leads them to lash out like children.

A lot don't because they're just ordinary people in a shit war, and I don't blame them for fighting any more that some french or german dumbass volunteering in ww1. Even if you know the theory and are socialist, Revolutionary Defeatism is a hard road to follow in a real war, especially at first.

But pretty much every elite or regular army unit does. And as militia get hardened by these cadre more and more take on their fash ideology, much as German proto fascists infiltrated the units that would become the freicorps.

It's fucked and Ukraine is gonna be a hotbed of not just Fascism but full Nazism if it survives, win or lose. Of course this war continues to strengthen the Fash opposition to Putin (who sucks, but isn't a fascist) in Russia as well. Only silver lining is that the communist rank and file is increasingly agitated as well.

Because there's been a concentrated propaganda effort since the 2014 coup to make fascist ideology acceptable. Look at what happened to the polled approval rating of Bandera between 2014 and 2022. It pretty much doubled. That is not an organic thing, it happened because the fascists wanted it to, and pushed hard for the normalisation of fascism since their 2014 coup.

I'll be as fair as I can about it, really seems like it's around 1 in 10.

Which is a fucking lot.

Ukrainian nazis are an insignificant minority with no real political power, but also it would be way too much to ask them to stop wearing nazi symbols or to not show them off front and center in all their propaganda.

And really, doesn't every military have its nazis? That's why we also constantly see pictures of American and Russian soldiers wearing nazi patches, right?

There is obviously a bias because the pictures with fascist imagery are worth posting for that very fact, but also a lot of major news outlets keep struggling to post even a small gallery without needing to scrub it.

It would be so fucking easy NOT to have death heads and sun-wheels on everything. It just seems that there is 0 problem to flaunt fash imaginery in the Ukranian forces. Which isnt suprising since neo-nazism seems to be pretty commonplace in Ukraine (even by european standards).

The exact bias that lead to Canada plucking a Nazi out of the thousands of possible veterans they could have chose and honored, yes

Turns out when virulently reactionary nationalism goes unchecked it proliferates among the populace. The entire reason those same nazis were allowed in to begin.

i assume the ones most on social media are the most ideologically commited, some unenthusiastic draftee probably isn't bragging and masturbating online about it.

i mean there's a draft, so it seems highly unlikely, but I think the nazis are the most in favor of the war, and therefore are the most willing to show up in propaganda begging for more guns.