Putin: Zelensky’s Jewishness is a smokescreen for ‘Nazified’ Ukraine

This isn’t the first time that Putin has accused Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky of supporting Nazism.

By World Israel News Staff

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Western powers who had installed Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodomyr Zelensky, had done so in order to distract from the reality that the country is controlled by Nazis.

“Western curators have put a person at the head of modern Ukraine – an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins,” Putin told a Russian TV station on Tuesday.

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

“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 a previous interview in June, Putin said that Zelensky is “not even a Jew.”

When journalists pushed back on that assertion, Putin clarified that “I have many Jewish friends since childhood. They say Zelensky is not a Jew – he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.”

While Zelensky and Jewish groups have responded with outrage to Putin’s claim, Ukraine does have a checkered history regarding support for Nazism and widespread antisemitism.

At least one Ukrainian paramilitary group fighting against the Russian invasion, called the Azov Battalion, has publicly embraced neo-Nazi ideology and uses Nazi symbology, including the SS lightning bolts, on their uniforms.

Stefan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who fought for independence from Russia and the Soviet Union, is considered a national hero in the country.

Residents of a Ukrainian city recently voted to name a street in honor of Bandera, who partnered with the Nazis and was involved in the mass slaughter of Jews and Poles in Ukraine during World War II.