In the shadowed corridors of 21st-century geopolitics, two pernicious ideologies converge: Vladimir Putin’s visceral antipathy toward Ukraine, manifesting as a full-scale invasion justified by fabricated narratives of "denazification", and the resurgence of anti-Zionism, a discourse that often veils deeper antisemitic impulses under the guise of anti-imperialist critique. At first glance, these phenomena appear disparate: one a regional territorial grievance rooted in Slavic irredentism, the other a global ideological current targeting Israel’s legitimacy. Yet, a closer examination reveals profound common roots. Both draw sustenance from the toxic soil of Soviet-era propaganda, where anti-Zionism was weaponized as state policy, blending Marxist-Leninist rhetoric with age-old conspiracy theories about Jewish global control. The thesis finds empirical grounding in the historical continuum from Stalinist purges to Putin’s hybrid warfare. Soviet anti-Zionism, peaking after the 1967 Six-Day War, recast Jews and Zionists as imperialist puppets, a trope revived today to demonize both Ukrainian sovereignty and Israeli self-defense. In Russia, this legacy fuels a narrative where Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is paradoxically branded a Nazi, while anti-Zionist rhetoric globally echoes claims of Zionist-Nazi collusion—absurdities that trace back to KGB-orchestrated disinformation. By dissecting these intersections, we illuminate how authoritarian regimes and their ideological heirs manipulate historical trauma to consolidate power, erode liberal norms, and perpetuate cycles of hatred. To understand the confluence, one must excavate the Soviet Union’s ideological arsenal, where anti-Zionism served as a thinly veiled conduit for antisemitism. Post-World War II, the USSR initially positioned itself as a bulwark against fascism, supporting Israel’s creation in 1948 as a counterweight to British colonialism. This alliance soured rapidly with the Cold War’s intensification and Israel’s alignment with the West. By the 1960s, Moscow’s foreign policy pivoted: Zionism was rebranded not as national liberation but as a "racist" ideology akin to Nazism, a slander codified in the 1975 UN Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism—a Soviet-backed measure repealed only in 1991. This shift was no mere diplomatic maneuver; it was a propaganda juggernaut. The KGB established the "Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public" in 1983, flooding media with forgeries alleging Zionist collaboration with Nazis during the Holocaust. One infamous claim posited that Zionists had "facilitated" Jewish extermination to expedite statehood, drawing on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a czarist forgery debunked yet eternally resilient in conspiratorial lore. Such narratives dehumanized Jews as disloyal cosmopolitans, echoing Stalin’s 1953 "Doctors' Plot," where Jewish physicians were accused of plotting against the state. This ethnic phobia extended beyond Jews: it encompassed any "national deviationist" threatening Soviet unity, from Ukrainian intellectuals during the Holodomor to Baltic dissidents. Putin’s worldview, steeped in KGB training, inherits this legacy wholesale. His doctoral dissertation on resource geopolitics and speeches invoking a "Russkiy Mir" (Russian World) betray a neo-imperial ethos that views independent states like Ukraine as aberrant fractures in a monolithic Slavic sphere. Just as Soviet anti-Zionism framed Israel as a Western implant in the Arab world, Putin’s Ukrainophobia portrays Kyiv as a NATO puppet, its agency illusory and its people "brainwashed" by external manipulators. The common root here is othering: both ideologies construct the enemy as a hybrid abomination, neither fully sovereign nor authentically "theirs", justifying intervention as "liberation." The 2022 invasion of Ukraine crystallized this alchemy, transmuting historical antisemitism into contemporary Ukrainophobia. Putin’s February 21 pre-invasion address invoked the "denazification" of Ukraine, a term evoking World War II heroism while inverting reality: Ukraine, with its Jewish president and history of Holocaust collaboration by some nationalists, is absurdly cast as a Reich redux. This rhetoric peaks in grotesque ironies, such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s 2022 claim that "Hitler also had Jewish blood," implying Zelenskyy’s heritage disqualifies his anti-Nazi credentials—a statement so egregious it drew rebukes from Israel and Ukraine alike. Beneath the absurdity lies Soviet DNA. Russian state media, via outlets like RT and Sputnik, recycles anti-Zionist tropes: Zelenskyy is not just a Nazi but a Zionist stooge, funded by George Soros in a cabal to "Judaize" Ukraine for Israeli gain. This mirrors classic anti-Zionist propaganda, where Jews are eternal schemers profiting from chaos. The Strategic Culture Foundation, a Kremlin-aligned think tank, amplifies this by alleging Soros orchestrates the war to spur aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel), blending medieval blood libel with modern globalism paranoia. Such claims have tangible effects: antisemitic incidents in Russia surged post-invasion, with Jewish emigration to Israel hitting 20,000 in 2022, driven by fears of pogrom-like reprisals. This fusion reveals the root: a conspiratorial epistemology where threats are never organic but engineered by a shadowy elite. In Ukraine’s case, it’s "Anglo-Saxon" Zionists; globally, anti-Zionism posits Israel as the nexus of Western imperialism, its actions in Gaza equated to genocide in a bid to delegitimize not just policy but existence. Both narratives absolve the aggressor—Russia in Donbas, Hamas in October 2023—by framing resistance as the true atrocity. Beyond Russia’s borders, modern anti-Zionism amplifies these roots, often unwittingly channeling Soviet scripts through social media and academic discourse. The trope of "Zionism = Nazism" permeates protests from U.S. campuses to European streets, where chants of "From the river to the sea" elide Israel’s erasure while invoking imperial victimhood. This is no coincidence: post-Soviet archives reveal how Moscow seeded Third World alliances with anti-Zionist curricula, influencing PLO charters and Arab nationalist tracts that persist today. In Putin’s orbit, this global echo chamber serves strategic ends. Russian disinformation exploits Israel-Gaza tensions to draw false equivalences with Ukraine: both are "genocides" by "Nazi" states, per Kremlin mouthpieces, eroding Western resolve on sanctions. Lavrov’s outbursts and Putin’s Gaza comparisons, likening Israeli operations to Nazi crimes, revive 1970s Soviet floats depicting Stars of David as swastikas. Conspiracy theorists, from QAnon fringes to leftist podcasts, link the conflicts via antisemitic nodes: "Zionist" control of media suppresses Ukraine truth, or Jewish billionaires fund both wars for profit. The common thread is revanchism: Putin’s dream of restoring Soviet borders mirrors anti-Zionist visions of a pre-1948 Palestine, both hinging on historical revisionism that airbrushes inconvenient facts (e.g., Arab rejectionism in 1947 or Ukraine’s 1991 independence referendum). This shared ontology, history as malleable myth, fosters alliances of convenience: Iran, a anti-Zionist bastion, supplies Russia drones for Ukraine, binding the axes in mutual enmity toward the West. At their core, these ideologies thrive on parallel mechanisms. First, conspiracism: Both posit a hidden hand, Zionist lobby or Banderite cabal, pulling strings, absolving masses of agency and elites of accountability. This echoes Protocols-style fantasies, where Jews/Ukrainians are "rootless cosmopolitans" undermining the volk. Second, nationalist mysticism: Putin’s "three peoples as one" erases Ukrainian distinctiveness, akin to anti-Zionist denial of Jewish indigeneity in the Levant. Both invoke sacred soil, Kyiv as "mother of Russian cities," Jerusalem as eternal capital, to sanctify expansionism. Third, instrumental trauma: Holocaust inversion (Zionists as Nazis) and Holodomor denial (Ukraine as aggressor) weaponize memory, turning victims into perpetrators. This moral inversion sustains propaganda ecosystems, from Telegram channels to TikTok algorithms, where echo chambers radicalize youth. Putin’s Ukrainophobia and modern anti-Zionism are symbiotic progeny of Soviet ideological engineering, their common roots in antisemitic forgery, imperial nostalgia, and conspiratorial paranoia yielding a worldview primed for perpetual conflict. As Russia grinds toward a frozen Donbas and anti-Zionist fervor fuels campus unrest, the peril lies in their normalization: what begins as rhetoric ends in Bucha massacres or synagogue arsons. Countering this demands vigilance—declassifying archives, amplifying survivor voices, and dismantling digital amplifiers. Only by tracing these threads to their authoritarian source can we sever the cycle, affirming that true security blooms not from erasure but from pluralistic embrace. In a world of fragile democracies, ignoring these convergences invites the ghosts of pogroms and purges to haunt anew.