Russian Defense Ministry television channel Zvezda presented a blog written by a university professor as the opinion of American media. University of Tulsa history professor Jeremy Kuzmarov, writing on the Huffington Post’s contributor platform speaks out against the US arming Ukraine, calls the war in Russian occupied Donbas “a difficult civil conflict” and claims “that many Ukrainians do not view the Poroshenko government as legitimate since it came to power in what many regard as a coup d’état in April 2014 heavily supported by the United States and West.”
While Kuzmarov, in his original post speaks out against the US arming Ukraine, Zvezda puts its own spin and interpretation on their version of this opinion piece. Not only does Zvezda present Kuzmarov as the voice of all American media, they also claim that that media is “questioning the legitimacy of the” neo-Nazi regime “in Ukraine and “American politicians do not take into account the fact that they are dealing with a” neo-Nazi state “.
Kuzmarov is a Huffington Post contributor, he regularly writes in the publication’s contributor platform, which allows writers to control their own work and post freely to the Huffington Post site. His views do not reflect the views of the Huffington Post editorial board and they certainly do not speak for or represent American media.
While Kuzmarov’s post is far from friendly to Ukraine and echoes many of the Kremlin’s anti-Ukrainian narratives, he never uses the terms neo-Nazi state or neo-Nazi regime. But he does use the term “neo-Nazi backed government”.
This is what he actually wrote: “The government furthermore has been equally corrupt as its predecessor and forged alliance with neo-Nazi groups who supported the so-called Maidan revolution of 2014… Western media almost uniformly branded Russia as an aggressor in the Ukrainian War. However, from the Russian point of view, the existence of a neo-Nazi backed government on its border backed by the West is alarming.”
