[BroJoeK]

CapandBall: "This is the part of the conversation where I say your numbers are wrong & from a bias source and mine are not, so I’ll just skip that; we will both believe what we want to believe."

I have no doubt that all the numbers are wrong, to some degree, and so I picked the estimates which seemed more likely to be closer to actual -- US or UN estimates when available.

CapandBall: "The Ukrainian neo-Nazi thing can’t be avoided though, and despite a lot of Internet scrubbing, plenty remains (I’ve intentionally selected mostly left-leaning sites)."

When you use the words "Ukrainian neo-Nazis" you tell the whole world, "I, CapandBall, am a babbling lunatic who has no clue what I mean, just parroting whatever drivel my masters in Moscow tell me to say."

In 2019 Ukrainians elected a Jewish president and a Jewish prime minister.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy won in a runoff with 73% of the popular vote.
That should tell us all we need to know about alleged "Nazis" in Ukraine.

Today Zelenskyy leads Ukraine in its existential struggle against the real modern-day Nazi-equivalents, Vlad the Invader and his army of orcs.

[CapandBall]

I don’t know what to tell you, but I understand why you are so confused. Additionally the German Nazis of 80 years ago considered all Slavic people to be untermench (sub-human) to be exterminated, just like the Jews. Russian and Ukrainian people are of course Slavic, so none of it makes sense through that lens. Maybe that’s why they call them NeoNazi (“new” nazi).

Putin’s “denazification” goal addresses minority ethnic persecution: that the minority ethnic Russians are persecuted by the majority ethnic Ukrainians.