Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion.

Addressing eight online focus groups in the four Visegrád Countries (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic), the researchers specifically asked the participants questions designed to examine the relationship between competitive victimhood and antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and Holocaust distortion. Putin insists he launched the "special operation" because "Ukraine's government is "openly neo-Nazi" and "pro-Nazi", controlled by 'little Nazis.'"[21] These assertions not only cast Ukraine as an enemy on the scale of Nazi Germany, but also allude to Soviet suffering and losses in World War II at the hands of the Nazis. Of course, one need not equate the crimes against ethnic Belarussians to the crimes committed during the Holocaust in order to highlight them, nor should the Holocaust be ignored when confronting the history of Belarus during World War II. According to Nikolay Koposov, who has written about Eastern European memory laws, this legislation "was an obvious attempt to downplay the importance of the Holocaust and present the Poles rather than the Jews as Hitler's main victims."[26] A certain ambivalence toward the Holocaust has remained, however, even in the Polish judiciary. [Extracted from the article]