Thread by @SlavaMalamud

(gets out his teacher's red pen)
OK, blyakha-mukha, let's perform some basic fact check on this wondrous, unbelievably insane document.
Spoiler alert: it has lies about lies, written in lies, and even grammar is lying.
Работа над ошибками, пацаны...

https://twitter.com/RussianEmbassyC/status/1498816008756383744

"Special military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine" is, of course, a full-out war on an independent nation. Putin's original verbiage declared it an operation "in Donbas", so obviously the lie is an evolving one.
We will come back to "denazifying" later...

Russian army most certainly occupies Ukraine's territory. Crimea is fully annexed, Donbas has been under effective control of Russia for 8 years and since the start of the war, more territory has fallen into Russian hands. Major cities Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupil are encircled...

"Taking all measures to preserve lives & safety of civilians" will be welcome news to the citizens of Kharkiv and Kyiv who have been under constant shelling. Those "high-precision weapons" are striking "military targets" such as oil reserves, a TV tower, city hall & kindergartens

The first paragraph contains a lie in every single sentence. In fact, two per sentence. The second paragraph, though, is 100% true, if you replace the word "Western" with "Russian."
Also, another Nazi reference. Russians kinda have a thing for this stuff...

There we go! Azov and Right Sector. The two bugaboos Russians have been harping on for 8 years now.
Let's talk about them, then.
This story was best described by @juliaioffe as "a kernel of truth spun into a cotton candy of lies", a time-hallowed Russian/Soviet tactic...

Truth: Ukrainians overthrew their incredibly, fairy-tale-ingly corrupt president, tightly aligned with Putin, in 2014. He was widely hated by a wide swath of Ukrainian population, for different reasons. The revolution included people from all ideological backgrounds...

And yes, this included far-right, ultra-nationalistic groups, some with neo-Nazi leanings, who had their own reasons to hate the Putin-aligned president. They were always a minority, though, due to right-wing groups' tendency to be very militarized, they were highly visible...

As the revolution faced armed repressions from the government, rebels welcomed all the help they could get. Russians, however, presented Azov and the Right Sector as the dominant, if not exclusive, forces behind the uprising. Putin's propaganda painted it all as a Nazi coup...

In reality, the "Euromaidan uprising", also known as "The Revolution of Dignity", had its main goal an establishment of a Western-style democracy and closer ties with the EU. Something Putin desperately tried to prevent. His goal was to tie Ukraine close to Russia via his puppets

The Azov Battalion does still exist. It's a small paramilitary group. The Right Sector is an utterly insignificant political party, polling in low single digits. Overall, they are comparable to a Michigan militia and a tiny European far-right party, respectively...

Every single European nation has groups and political movements like that. Including Russia. In some, like in France and Hungary, they are very influential. In Ukraine, they don't matter, and the Ukrainian government is in no way influenced by them.

Ukraine's president is Jewish (until recently, so was its Prime Minister), the Mayor of Kyiv (the famous boxer Klitschko) is quarter Jewish. Both had relatives perish in the Holocaust. On the whole, Ukraine is much less right-wing, racist and fascist than Russia is. MUCH less...

Russia's propaganda LOVES to zero in on a small fragment of fact and blow it completely out of proportion, hammering on it and presenting it as the entire picture. The Azov/Right Sector lie is a perfect example of this.

The fourth paragraph is absolute projection. Russians are describing, very accurately, the tactics they have been using in Donbas since 2014. "Russian-backed separatists" (in reality, covert Russian agents and officially discharged soldiers and officers) have engaged in...

... these very tactics. After forcibly separating two easternmost regions from the rest of Ukraine, they have been lobbing rockets into Ukrainian territory from residential areas of Luhansk and Donetsk, provoking, often successfully, responses that resulted in civilian casualties

This has allowed Russia to spin the narrative of "8 years of genocide in Donbas", which they eventually used as a pretext for the invasion.
"Genocide", of course, is another layer of lies. According to Moscow, Ukraine is attempting to eradicate its country's Russian-speakers...

This is absolute insanity. A huge number of Ukrainians speaks Russian or a dialect of Russian called "surjic" (Rus. with some Ukrainian words and a characteristic accent) as their main and only language. Major cities, such as Kharkiv, Kryvy Rih, Odesa are mostly Russian-speaking

Zelensky himself is a Russian-speaker. He only learned to speak Ukrainian in the run-up to his 2019 presidential campaign. It's still relatively poor, the fact Zelensky himself does not hide. He underscores his Russian-speaking history as a way to build bridges...

If Ukraine truly attempted a genocide of Russian speakers, it would need to half its own population and destroy most of its own government.
Now, for the "rationale behind these actions" (those being the attempted conquest of Ukraine by Putin's Russia)...

The Russian army is absolutely fighting Ukraine and Ukrainians.
Putin has made it 100% clear: Ukraine, as an independent nation, should not exist. It was, in his revisionist, demented vision of history, a creation of Vladimir Lenin, and must be returned to Russia.

Clearing Ukraine from Nazism will be extremely hard, since you first have to find it there. Russia, though, is doing a splendid job clearing Ukraine of its Holocaust memorials (the largest was bombed today, 5 people died) and is trying like hell to clear it of prominent Jews.

BTW, here is the man sent to Kyiv in order to "denazify" the Jewish Zelensky. Meet Dmitry Utkin, the leader of Putin's assassin squad. Check out his tattoos.
Yup, that's the swastika eagle and the SS badges. Because, unlike Zelensky, Utkin (call name "Wagner") is an actual Nazi.

The final sentences ("Russia does not start wars. Russia is ending them") is a popular jingoistic slogan used by Putin in order to stir up aggressive militarism in Russian society. Another popular slogan is "We can repeat", as in "We can come to Europe again."
Yes, very peaceful.

But the true cherry on top, the most delicious twist is the use of grammar.
Because, of course, the letter writes the name of Ukraine's capital as "Kiev", instead of the internationally recognized "Kyiv." The latter is the Ukrainian transcription, the former is Russian...

Because the country that "is not fighting Ukrainians" and is merely "preventing genocide" and "eradicating nazism" actually does not recognize Ukrainians' right to speak their own language and name their own cities. The use of Kiev and other colonial topography is intentional...

This is done in order to portray Ukraine as a country without its own identity, a country whose very existential meaning is shaped by Russia. This rhetoric has been actively in use in Russia since 2014. Russian TV pundits routinely speak of Ukrainian as "illiterate Russian"...

... and mock Ukrainian speakers as bumpkins and untermenschen. The usage of colonial toponyms in English and other subtle verbal trolling (saying "on Ukraine" in Russian instead of "in Ukraine") has only one goal in mind: to deny the existence of Ukrainian sovereignty...

Thus, with a simple spelling choice, the Russian Embassy stupidly and blithely destroyed the entire narrative of its blatantly perfidious missive. Yes, they are fighting Ukraine. Yes, it's a war of conquest and recolonization. And yes, it is Russia that is fascist and genocidal.

Other than that, the letter is mostly accurate.

Ну че, на двоечку, пацаны. Завтра на переэкзаменовку. К профессору Байрактару.