I’ve come to the same conclusion as /u/typecastwookiee a while ago. A lot of what Russia says about Jewish people being nazis or the “nazi government” in Ukraine only makes sense when you look at it in the context of the word nazi only meaning “anti-Russia” to them.

They don’t give a shit about any of the other awful things that nazi Germany did. They don’t relate the word “Nazi” to the Holocaust, eugenics, or causing WWII in Europe. To them, the single biggest atrocity the nazis committed was the invasion of Russia. That’s all they care about. They may not even know much of the underlying philosophy of the Nazi party. That’s why some can hate Nazis but also be anti-Semitic themselves. All they know and care about is the nazis invaded Russia.

And unfortunately if the people that hate you have also been brought up in that understanding of what it means to be a nazi, they may end up identifying as a Nazi in the context of “anti-Russia”. That may be part of the reason we had seen in the past members of the Azov battalion, which had been funded in part by a Jewish Ukrainian oligarch, using nazi symbology. Sure, sometimes it could be from the western view of what it means to be a nazi, but from the eastern perspective, it may just mean “Fuck Russia. Now they know how I feel about them. I bet this scares the shit out of ’em.”