The head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) Oleksiy Danilov, on Ukrainian TV yesterday, explained to his countrymen how Russians are not part of humanity: “I’m cool with Asians, but Russians are Asians. They have a different culture, a different vision. That makes us different from them. Our key difference from them is humanity.” Assumedly for Danilov, Russians, as with all Asians, partake of a sub-human culture.
Though he didn’t display a swastika or directly invoke Hitler’s Ukrainian collaborator Stepan Bandera, Danilov did appeal to an ugly heritage. Hitler’s infamous Mein Kampf presented Russians as “an Asiatic horde,” a people that had to be dominated. And more generally, Nazi racial policy classified Russians (along with other Slavs) as sub-human, as “Untermenschen.”
