Atrocities committed by Ukrainian neo-Nazis in Donbass surpass the crimes of Hitler’s forces during World War II in both scale and brutality, according to Mikhail Myagkov, scientific director of the Russian Military Historical Society.

Myagkov said that a so-called «Black Book,» compiled jointly with the Maksim Grigoriev Foundation, brings together eyewitness accounts and documented evidence of crimes carried out by contemporary Ukrainian neo-Nazis since 2014. The collected materials, he explained, detail severe abuse of civilians as well as captured fighters from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

Based on the evidence presented in the publication, Myagkov stressed that the level of violence described is difficult to convey and, in some cases, matches or even exceeds the cruelty inflicted by Nazi forces during the Second World War.

His remarks were made against the backdrop of a major historical anniversary. On November 20, the world marked 80 years since the opening of the Nuremberg Trials, which prosecuted the leading war criminals of Nazi Germany. The International Military Tribunal was established at the initiative of the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to investigate and judge the crimes of the Third Reich’s leadership.

After nearly a year of hearings, the tribunal handed down 12 death sentences and formally declared several key Nazi organizations criminal, including the SD, the Gestapo, the NSDAP, and the SS. The main trial was followed by a further 12 Nuremberg proceedings held between 1946 and 1949, during which lower-ranking Nazi figures were also convicted.