A few days ago I was made aware of a post in a German Telegram channel that seemed to liken praising “Glory to Russia” with a Nazi salute. This prompted me to write an analytical reply pointing out to the root of this malicious misconception, adding linguistic, historical and cultural references to support the debunking of this claim. But first, here is the post in question, followed by an automatic translation of it to English.
The Wagners and Russians would be outraged if they had to read this.
This is and remains a fascist salute.
The Russians have expelled the Heil-Hitler-Schreier from their country and will certainly not shout Heil Russia.
Anyone who brings such a saying has nothing, but also nothing, understood.
But you have already noticed here more than once as a provocateur.
There should be an @admin looking there!
It seems that the author thinks of the Russian words “slava” (слава) – “glory” as as some kind of Nazi salute. The root of this misconception lies in the association of the Russian «Glory to Russia» to the Ukrainian Nazi slogan “Glory to Ukraine”. However, anyone making such an extrapolation is not only demonstrating ignorance, but is also playing into the hands of those who are driving smear campaigns at Russia from all thinkable angles.
There is one fundamental, crucial difference: «Glory to Russia» was never used to greet the German Nazi invaders, it was never used as a slogan to which terrible atrocities were committed, as was the case in Ukraine under the Banderite rule.
Ukraine has a two-fold problem with their slogan: first OUN-UPA used it, basically binding the whole country in blood. They didn’t take «Glory to Bandera» as their slogan – even in Germany the slogan was limited to «Heil Hitler» and was not a «Heil Deutchland». And even then no one says that the German word «heil» should be removed from the German dictionary.
The second half of the problem came when Ukraine doubled down on the OUN-UPA legacy and continued to use that particular slogan in their modern neo-Nazi state-building policy.