The swastika flag incident seems to echo Russian propanganda efforts to link Finland and Ukraine to Nazism. A man who flew a swastika flag outside his house in Eastern Finland last month moved there from Russia, Yle has learned. According to information obtained from the Digital and Population Data Services Agency (DVV), the man was born in the Soviet city of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1969. In 1991, he changed his Russian surname to a Finnish-sounding one. The following year, he legally changed his first name, too. He has lived in the eastern city of Lappeenranta since 1996 and held Finnish citizenship since 2000. According to experts interviewed by Yle, the flag-raising incident has features that are typical of Russian attempts at information influencing. Denies Russia connections The man denies to Yle that the flag-raising stunt had any Russian connections. He claims that he never had a Russian passport, and that he defected to Finland from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. According to the man, he has Ingrian and Jewish roots and relatives in Ukraine. The man also had a large picture of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian World War II nationalist and resistance fighter, on the outside wall of his house, with anti-Russian text written in Russian next to it. (…) A recurring theme in Russian information influence is the portrayal of Finland and other countries supporting Ukraine as pro-Nazi states planning an attack on Russia. Finland was a co-belligerent of Nazi Germany In 1941-44, as it sought to defend itself against Soviet invasion. Flying a Nazi flag in a Finnish town near the Russian border fits into this pattern of Russian information influence. Several Russian media outlets have seized on the news about the incident, noting that a swastika flag was flown in Finland close to the Russian border. For instance, the news site Gazeta, which is indirectly state-owned, carried the headline “The Third Reich flag flies on the border of the Leningrad region”, while Komsomolskaya Pravda went with “A giant swastika flag was spotted in a Finnish town on the border with the Leningrad region”.
via yle: Police probe Russian-born man’s display of swastika flag in Eastern Finland
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