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Notes -
I tried to look into this some a while back, mostly along the lines of, what's the deal with the supposedly-Nazi Azov Battalion working together with Jewish Ukraine President Zelensky? What I came away with is, there's more than one perspective on Nazism.
There's the actual original Nazi party, a creature of 1920s Germany. Started out with mostly reasonable-sounding goals, but went to a very bad place. They're long gone now though, and nobody but some nerdy historians seems terribly concerned with what they actually thought and why.
There's how modern Westerners see Nazism, a mix of authoritarianism, warmongering imperialism, and racism and anti-semitism to the point of genocide. Reasonable given our perspective and role in the actual war, but probably not very well connected to how actual Nazi party members saw themselves.
How Russians and Eastern Europeans saw Nazism is another perspective entirely, with no connection to either of the others. Many in Russia, particularly Russian nationalists, see them as a horrific menace, bent on total destruction of their people and culture, that they only barely survived by tremendous effort and sacrifice. And quite a few in Ukraine, particularly Ukrainian Nationalists, see them primarily as a bulwark against Soviet/Russian domination, which was itself quite brutal and arguably genocidal against Ukrainians. I believe this strain is what Azov represents - it's just a meme demonstrating that they're really, seriously, majorly opposed to Russian domination. I don't think they have any awareness of, much less actually share, any of the actual viewpoints and goals of the original Nazi party, and of course have nothing to do with the Western view of Nazism. I think they'd be utterly baffled if you tried to discuss with them whether they intended to rampage across Europe and round up all the Jews if they were to win. They'd have no idea where you were coming from or how you got it into your head that they might want to do that.
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