Putin accuses of 'maniacal anti-Semitism' over Zelensky comments

Putin claims the West installed Jewish Volodymyr Zelensky as president of Ukraine ‘to cover up the glorification of Nazism’: Kyiv condemns his ‘maniacal anti-Semitism’

• Putin has often claimed Ukraine is a Nazi state to justify his brutal invasion
• This has been refuted by Kyiv, the West – as well as historians and academics – who say his assault on Ukraine is nothing more than an imperialistic land grab 

An unhinged Vladimir Putin has claimed the West deliberately installed a Jewish Ukrainian leader to cover up the glorification of Nazism.

In his poisonous diatribe on state TV against Volodymyr Zelensky, the Russian despot repeated the false claim that Kyiv’s other leaders pursued neo-Nazi ‘genocide’ against Ukraine’s millions of native Russian-speakers.

Kyiv has denounced 70 year old Putin’s ‘maniacal obsession with the Ukrainian president’s ethnic origin [as being] another manifestation of the deep-rooted antisemitism of the Russian elite’.

In an attempt to justify his land grab war in Ukraine, Putin said: ‘Western curators have put a person at the head of modern Ukraine – an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins.

‘And thus, in my opinion, they seem to be covering up an anti-human essence that is the foundation… of the modern Ukrainian state…

An unhinged Vladimir Putin (pictured) has claimed the West deliberately installed a Jewish Ukrainian leader to cover up the glorification of Nazism

‘And this makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in that an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and covering up those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine at one time – and this is the extermination of one and a half million people.’

In seeking to justify its invasion of Ukraine, which it calls a ‘special military operation’, Moscow has claimed the country is a Nazi state and accuses Kyiv’s leaders of pursuing a neo-Nazi ‘genocide’ of Ukraine’s millions of native Russian-speakers.

He has done so without providing evidence, and there is no evidence to back his claims. Kyiv and its Western allies call this a baseless pretext for a war of acquisition. 

In June, Putin told an economic forum in St Petersburg, again without evidence, that some Jews considered Zelenskiy a disgrace to their people, as he interrupted his own address to show newsreel footage of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine. 

And in January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov drew a sharp rebuke from the White House for accusing Washington of marshalling European countries to solve ‘the Russian question’ in the same way that Adolf Hitler had sought a ‘final solution’ to eradicate Europe’s Jews.

Meanwhile, Putin has expressed the view that Ukraine is not a real state and should be part of his Russian empire.

He has also claimed his so-called ‘special military operation’ is an effort to bring about the ‘denazification’ of a belligerent imperial power backed by the west.

This narrative has been refuted by Kyiv and its allies, and there is no evidence to support Putin’s claim that Ukraine is a Nazi state. 

Zelensky – who is Jewish, Russian speaking, and has said members of his family were killed by Nazi Germany in the Second World War – was democratically elected in 2019 with more than 70 percent of the vote.

He has repeatedly rejected Russian accusations that he has supported neo-Nazis in Ukraine. 

In his poisonous diatribe on state TV against Volodymyr Zelensky (pictured September 4), the Russian despot repeated the false claim that Kyiv ‘s other leaders pursued neo-Nazi ‘genocide’ against Ukraine ‘s millions of native Russian-speakers

No parties that formed an extreme-right coalition in Ukraine won enough votes to win a proportional seat in the country’s parliament. The Svoboda party, a far-right nationalist party, was able to secure a single constituency seat.

On February 27, 2022 – three days after Putin ordered his forces to begin their invasion of Ukraine, some of the world’s leading historians of Nazism and the Holocaust released a statement rejecting Putin’s baseless claims.

‘We strongly reject the Russian government’s … equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression,’ it said.

‘This rhetoric is factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it’. It added: ‘It was propaganda in 2014. It remains propaganda today.’

The statement said that while Ukraine ‘has right-wing extremists and violent xenophobic groups’ like any country, ‘none of this justifies the Russian aggression and the gross mischaracterisation of Ukraine’.

The statement was signed by hundreds more historians and scholars.

As for Russia, a survey in 2018 found 14 percent of the population would not like to have Jews as their fellow citizens. This was compared with five percent in Ukraine.

The far-right has been heavily represented among pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, with several past or current leaders of the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk being linked to neo-Nazi, white supremacist and ultra-nationalist groups.

The West says Putin’s invasion is nothing more than an imperialistic land grab by Russia with the goal of eradicating a sovereign nation.

Hundreds of thousands have perished in his war launched in February 2022 which aimed initially to take the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and topple Zelensky’s government before annexing the entire country.

Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Oleh Nikolenko accused Putin and the Russian elite of ‘deep-rooted antisemitism’.

‘We call on the world to strongly condemn the Russian president’s antisemitic statements,’ he said.

‘In the modern world, there should be no place for hatred on ethnic grounds.’

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Putin himself was disgusting ‘when he tries to justify mass crimes against citizens of another country with a monstrous lie’.

In seeking to justify its invasion of Ukraine, which it calls a ‘special military operation’, Moscow has claimed the country is a Nazi state and accuses Kyiv’s leaders of pursuing a neo-Nazi ‘genocide’ of Ukraine’s millions of native Russian-speakers. He has done so without providing evidence, and there is no evidence to back his claims. Kyiv and its Western allies call this a baseless pretext for a war of acquisition. Pictured: A Ukrainian soldier near Bakhmut, Sept. 4

Some estimates suggest 1.7 million Soviet Jews – mainly from Russia and Ukraine – were killed by the German Nazis and their collaborators by late 1942.

But others say this figure is much higher, with between 850,000 to 1.6 million Jews  from Ukraine alone being killed by Nazi Germany.

Before the Second World War, 1.5 million Jews lived in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, and constituted the largest Jewish population within the Soviet Union.

In 2014, that figure was estimated to be around 400,000. 

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