"Ukraine has worked for years.... to contain a fringe far-right movement whose members proudly wear symbols steeped in Nazi history..."

"... and espouse views hostile to leftists, L.G.B.T.Q. movements and ethnic minorities. But some members of these groups have been fighting Russia since the Kremlin illegally annexed part of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 and are now part of the broader military structure. Some are regarded as national heroes, even as the far-right remains marginalized politically. The iconography of these groups, including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line, including soldiers who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty and pride, not Nazism. In the short term, that threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin’s propaganda and give fuel to his false claims that Ukraine must be 'de-Nazified'...." 

From "Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines Highlight Thorny Issues of History/Troops’ use of patches bearing Nazi emblems risks fueling Russian propaganda and spreading imagery that the West has spent a half-century trying to eliminate" (NYT).

Questions over how to interpret such symbols are as divisive as they are persistent, and not just in Ukraine. In the American South, some have insisted that today, the Confederate flag symbolizes pride, not its history of racism and secession. The swastika was an important Hindu symbol before it was co-opted by the Nazis.

In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry posted a photograph on its Twitter account of a soldier wearing a patch featuring a skull and crossbones known as the Totenkopf, or Death’s Head. The specific symbol in the picture was made notorious by a Nazi unit that committed war crimes and guarded concentration camps during World War II....

Ihor Kozlovskyi, a Ukrainian historian and religious scholar, said that the symbols had meanings that were unique to Ukraine and should be interpreted by how Ukrainians viewed them, not by how they had been used elsewhere. “The symbol can live in any community or any history independently of how it is used in other parts of Earth,” Mr. Kozlovskyi said.... 

The Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939, so it was caught by surprise two years later when the Nazis invaded Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had suffered greatly under a Soviet government that engineered a famine that killed millions. Many Ukrainians initially viewed the Nazis as liberators. Factions from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its insurgent army fought alongside the Nazis in what they viewed as a struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty. Members of those groups also took part in atrocities against Jewish and Polish civilians... 

The top-rated comment at the NYT comes from j Szymborska in Wroclaw, Poland:

I don't believe that Ukraine as a whole is infected by Nazism. That being said, here in Poland we see many young men in their teens who espouse very hateful attitudes to anything related to the other. This of course is a product of growing up in a very homogenous culture. We have hosted refugees and the degree to which they have, at the least disrespect, and the most hate, for members of the LGBTQ community and members of nonwhite/European ethnic groups is troubling, to say the least. I often wonder how true it is when I hear members of the EU say things like, "Ukrainians are fighting for European values." I would love to see a journalist give any of the fighters on the front lines a checklist of "European values" and ask them which of them they are fighting for.

This does not excuse, justify or otherwise trivialize the war, but we should be honest because if we are not the post-war world will be a rude awakening for the EU and the west.