WASHINGTON — Ukrainian society must be “cleansed of Nazi elements,” a leading Russian intellectual wrote in an essay published on Sunday, as Ukrainian soldiers sifted through the gruesome aftermath of a slaughter of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.

The article, titled “What Should Russia Do With Ukraine?” was published on the website of RIA Novosti, a news agency controlled by the Kremlin. Its author, Timofey Sergeytsev, is described as a “political technologist.” He previously worked for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Kremlin president of Ukraine ousted during protests in 2014.

Faithfully echoing the arguments that have been proffered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Sergeytsev even puts the blame on the civilian population. “A significant number of common people are also guilty of being passive Nazis and Nazi accomplices,” Sergeytsev writes. “They supported the Nazi authorities and pandered to them.”

Sergeytsev has made “outlandish, outrageous claims in the past,” Oxford expert on Russian affairs Samuel Ramani told Yahoo News. But in this case, the article “represents mainstream Kremlin thinking.”

Ukrainian activists translated the article into English after the Russian-language version was circulated widely on social media.

“This is what real #Russia wants,” the activists wrote.

“As naked an endorsement of genocide as you’ll read in a state-owned media organ,” wrote Russia expert Michael Weiss on Twitter about the Sergeytsev article.

The article amounts to a “genocide masterplan,” Berlin-based Russia expert Sergej Sumlenny told Yahoo News in a text message. He predicted that Sergeytsev’s musings would be used as justification for more atrocities like the one at Bucha.

Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine in February under the fictitious pretenses that the nation’s leadership was rife with “Nazi” extremists. Although there are far-right elements in Ukraine’s society, and its military, they constitute an out-of-power fringe, as they do in other European states. Russia’s claims are rendered especially absurd given the fact that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is one of the few Jewish leaders on the world stage. Zelensky and some of his predecessors have sought to orient the nation away from Russia, toward the West, thus incurring the Kremlin’s ire.

Russia is “not just after piecemeal annexation of territory,” Ramani told Yahoo News of Sergeytsev’s lengthy musings. “It’s about suppressing the Ukrainian identity, and it equates any kind of expression of Ukrainian nationalism with Nazism,” even when those expressions of national feeling are being voiced by Zelensky, who had family members who fought against the Nazis in World War II — and others who perished in the Holocaust.

In his RIA Novosti article, Sergeytsev essentially calls for the elimination of Ukrainian national identity. “The name ‘Ukraine’ cannot be kept as a title of any fully denazified state entity on the territory liberated from the Nazi regime,” he writes. “The people’s republics, newly created on the territories free from Nazism, must and will develop on the basis of practices of economic self-government and social security, restoration and modernization of systems of essential services for the population.”

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Zelensky addressed the article in a call with Romanian politicians on Monday, saying it would be used as “evidence in a future tribunal of Russian war crimes.” He said the article called for “the annihilation of everything that makes Ukrainians Ukrainian.”

Putin has long seen Ukraine as part of a broader, Moscow-led Slavic empire, a vision articulated by intellectuals who have provided a philosophical backing for the Kremlin’s aggressive aims in Ukraine and elsewhere. Although Ukrainians share cultural, religious and linguistic similarities with Russia, they have long bristled at being treated like a junior partner. Ukraine has been its own nation since the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1991.

Sergeytsev’s article is a window into how the Kremlin apparently continues to see the Ukraine invasion, despite seemingly abandoning its “denazification” project last week amid mounting military losses.

Regime change is no longer a public Russian condition for peace. But whether the Kremlin truly seeks an end to fighting remains unclear.

For one, the Kremlin continues to promote its unfounded claims of Ukrainian extremism, with former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev writing in a Monday social media post that “a passionate segment of Ukrainian society has been praying to the Third Reich for the last 30 years. Literally.”

Going even further in his RIA Novosti essay, Sergeytsev argues that “Ukra-nazism poses a much bigger threat to the world and Russia than the Hitler version of German Nazism.” Russian media has been full of lurid stories about the supposed slaughter of ethnic Russians by Ukrainian troops. Outlandish conspiracy theories about bioweapons laboratories funded by Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and George Soros, the Jewish philanthropist, have also proliferated widely in Russian media — and without any evident skepticism.

Adolf Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions of Russians and Ukrainians, as well as the extermination of 6 million Jews. Russian propaganda has latched on to the fact that there were also Ukrainian collaborators who worked with the Nazis during Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Those Ukrainian nationalists hoped to secure independence from the brutal Soviet rule, which was itself responsible for millions of deaths in Ukraine.

Zelensky and his supporters argue that if any regime represents modern-day Nazi Germany, it is the one found in Moscow.

“It’s important to spread this article,” the Ukrainians who posted the English-language version of Sergeytsev’s essay wrote. “The world should be aware of Russian methods, crimes, and plans. Putin will not stop until he is stopped.”

_____

What happened this week in Ukraine? Check out this explainer from Yahoo Immersive to find out.

Former President Donald Trump and 18 other people were charged Monday for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the state of Georgia.

According to the 98-page indictment, Trump is named in 13 of the felony charges, including racketeering (under Georgia RICO laws), conspiracy to commit forgery, filing of false documents and soliciting a violation of oath by a public officer. Among the others facing charges in Georgia are members of Trump’s legal team, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis. The indictment includes 41 charges in total.

In April, Trump became the first former president to ever be indicted on criminal charges when prosecutors in New York alleged he committed campaign finance violations to cover up a relationship with adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election. Since then he has been charged three more times: In Florida for his handling of classified material and attempts to obstruct an investigation into those documents and in both Washington, D.C., (by federal prosecutors) and now Atlanta (by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis) for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

While Trump continues to dominate in polling for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he faces numerous court appearances next year that conflict with the primary schedule, with special counsel Jack Smith proposing last week that the trial in Washington, D.C., begin in January, days before the Iowa caucuses.

In a statement, the Trump campaign called Willis a "rabid partisan" and said the former president is the victim of a "legal double-standard."

Read the full indictment:

“I did not choose this. I did not choose for Donald Trump to be on my plate,” Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis told Yahoo News last year. But his blatant efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election left her with no choice but to pursue a criminal case against him, she argued.

That effort culminated on Monday night with an indictment against Trump and 18 others on 41 racketeering charges related to the presidential election they allegedly tried to subvert.

“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost,” the indictment charges, “and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”

The woman behind the indictment could be Trump’s biggest nemesis yet. Willis has taken on teachers, rappers and ordinary criminals. Now she seeks to convict a former occupant of the White House.

Read more on Yahoo News: Trump Has ‘Blatantly Unlawful’ Tantrum About Georgia Grand Jury Witness, via Daily Beast

An education in civil rights

Willis was raised by her father, a member of the Black Panthers who later became a celebrated attorney. “Since I was a very little bitty girl, you get dragged to the polls,” she told Yahoo News.

She went to Howard, the prestigious, historically Black university in Washington, D.C., then to Emory in Atlanta for law school. Afterward, she became a prosecutor in the Fulton County district attorney’s office.

Her boss there was Paul Howard Jr., the man she would unseat more than two decades later.

Read more on Yahoo News: How Trump Camp And Allies Allegedly Pursued Nationwide Effort To Breach Voting Machines

The cheating scandal

In 2009, an investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed “extraordinary gains or drops” in standardized test scores in several city schools. These were not isolated cases, it quickly became clear, but rather a massive, coordinated scheme orchestrated by the city’s top educators.

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A state investigation followed, revealing that an astonishing 178 educators were involved in the district-wide cheating scheme, which was enabled by “a culture of fear and a conspiracy of silence.”

Ultimately, only 12 educators, including the by-then-former Superintendent Beverly Hall, went on trial, which began in 2014. Willis tried the case. In its coverage of the proceedings, the New York Times described Willis as making “a lengthy opening statement, peppered with both slangy Southernisms and pointed indignation.”

She would win convictions for 11 of the 12 defendants.

Read more on Yahoo News: America's biggest teacher and principal cheating scandal unfolds in Atlanta, via the Christian Science Monitor

Taking on Young Thug

The cheating case showed that Willis was unafraid to take on powerful, entrenched interests. She got a chance to do so again in 2022, when she indicted 28 members of Young Stoner Life, the rap label run by prominent Atlanta artist Young Thug.

Willis, however, saw YSL as little more than a criminal enterprise, one she said was associated “with the national Bloods gang.” The indictment presented by her office charged that music was secondary to YSL’s operations, which allegedly included “obtaining money, weapons and other property through acts of racketeering activity, including robbery, theft and the unlawful sale and distribution of drugs.”

Her office has cited rap lyrics as evidence, brushing off suggestions that doing so criminalizes the creative act. Courtroom proceedings against Young Thug and his associates are ongoing.

Read more on Yahoo News: Rapper Young Thug to go to trial in gang, racketeering case, via Associated Press

The biggest case of all

Willis took office one day after Trump made his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a desperate — and possibly illegal — attempt to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat at Joe Biden’s hands the previous November.

“My very first day in this office — in that conference room, it’s all over the TV,” she later told the Times.

She intends to use the same racketeering laws that she charged the cheating teachers and Young Thug with violating to prosecute the case against Trump. The statutes, known as RICO, tend to be used against organized crime enterprises.

As legal scholar Clark Cunningham of Georgia State explained to ABC News, framing the case as a conspiracy acknowledges its inherent complexity: "What a RICO prosecution does is it takes a lot of different pieces, odd shapes, different colors that may not seem to have any relationship with each other. If the prosecution is successful, the jury says, 'Oh my God, I see the picture. ... I see a vast conspiracy here.'"

Trump is also facing several other state and federal indictments. As with those cases, he has complained that he is the target of selective prosecution intended to keep him out of the White House, as he is now the frontrunner for the 2024 presidential nomination.

At a rally last week, he baselessly accused Willis of having an affair with a gang member.

Read more on Yahoo News: How Fani Willis oversaw what might be the most sprawling legal case against Donald Trump

Hawaiian government officials are urging tourists to cancel or postpone imminent travel to the Hawaiian island of Maui in the wake of wildfires that have killed at least 96 people.

“In the weeks ahead, the collective resources and attention of the federal, state and county government, the West Maui community, and the travel industry must be focused on the recovery of residents who were forced to evacuate their homes and businesses,” the agency said in a statement late Saturday.

In the devastated town of Lahaina, toxic fumes and particles are still rampant, and even Lahaina residents are being urged to wait longer to return. Hawaii’s state toxicologist, Diana Felton, told Hawaii Public Radio the cleanup will take weeks or months before it is safe.

As of Monday morning, 46,000 people had flown out of West Maui since the fires began last Wednesday.

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said 1,000 hotel rooms are being used to house residents who lost their homes and first responders from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, while some hotels will continue normal business to help sustain the local economy.

Tourism-related industries account for a majority of Maui's private sector jobs, and some analysts are warning of a severe hit to the local economy — although experts say other tourist destinations have rebounded from natural disasters before.

The severity of the fires was caused by a number of factors, including strong winds from Hurricane Dora and dried-out vegetation that provided the fuel. Climate change and the importation of invasive, fire-prone trees and grasses played a part as well. But the fires and the devastation they wrought raise questions about whether Hawaii’s largest industry, the lifeblood of its economy, could also have contributed to the catastrophe by draining wetlands and drawing down the state’s water supply.

The root cause of the blaze

Historically, massive wildfires were uncommon in Hawaii because of its humid, tropical climate. But this year, a local drought caused the foliage on Maui to become drier than usual. Invasive grasses covering former sugar plantations were especially dried out this year and fire-prone, the New York Times reported.

Before it was drained by plantation owners irrigating their farms, the Lahaina area was a wetland, according to the local environmental advocacy organization Save the Wetlands.

“Lahaina wasn’t always a dry, fire-prone region. It was very wet and lush, historically,” Kaniela Ing, an Indigenous Hawaiian who is national director of the Green New Deal Network, told the newsletter Heated.

More recently, wetlands have been paved over to build hotels and vacation homes.

“In the last 60 years, more than 100 acres of Kihei’s wetlands have been gobbled up, which exploded from a tiny rural town to one of Hawaii’s busiest tourist destinations over the course of a single lifetime,” the Honolulu Civil Beat reported in a June story on the island's last remain wetland.

No water to put out the flames

Firefighters found water pressure from hydrants too weak to extinguish the flames.

“There was just no water in the hydrants,” Keahi Ho, a firefighter who was on duty in Lahaina, told the New York Times. It’s unclear what caused the shortfall: Possible culprits include outages of power — which is needed to pump the water — caused by strong winds and leakage from pipes melting from the fire's heat.

The Times also noted that Hawaii has been struggling with water scarcity, both acutely due to the current drought and in recent years generally, as rainfall has declined — possibly due to factors linked to climate change, such as thinner clouds caused by warmer temperatures and big storms moving northward.

Some environmentalists say that outsize demand from the tourism industry has worsened water scarcity.

Maui’s western coastline, where tourists cluster in beachfront hotels, receives less than 10 inches of water per year, but freshwater is diverted from the rainier inland areas to keep its manicured lawns “lush and green, with many pools, water slides and fountains,” the news outlet SFGate reported in late July.

Of the top 20 water consumers in Maui, 16 are hotels, time-shares and other short-term rentals.

“The fact is that the people where the water originates are hurting for water,” Lucienne de Naie, chairperson for the Sierra Club Maui Group, told SFGate. “There are definitely shortages of water from overtourism.”

A housing crisis

The majority of wildfires in Hawaii are started by humans, and the New York Times noted that “Hawaii’s acute housing shortage, reflected in a large homeless population which often cooks food outside, increases the risks of more ignitions, researchers say.”

The housing shortage, and its related high costs, are reportedly caused by a growing population and regulatory restrictions on new development. The diversion of housing to use for tourists as short-term rentals also drives up prices, according to a recent study by the University of Hawaii.