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’

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

In his venomous tirade on state television against Volodymyr Zelensky, the Russian despot repeated the false claim that Kiev’s other leaders were pursuing the neo-Nazi genocide against the millions of Ukrainian native speakers of Russian.

Kiev has denounced “70-year-old Putin’s maniacal obsession with the Ukrainian president’s ethnicity as a new manifestation of the deep-seated anti-Semitism of the Russian elite.”

Trying to justify his land grabbing war in Ukraine, Putin said: “Western curators have placed one person at the head of modern Ukraine: an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish descent.

“And in doing so, in my opinion, they seem to obscure an anti-human essence that is the basis of the modern Ukrainian state.

“And this makes the whole situation extremely repugnant, because an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and covering up those who once led the Holocaust in Ukraine – and this is the extermination of one and a half million people.”

In an attempt to justify its invasion of Ukraine, which it calls a “special military operation,” Moscow has claimed the country is a Nazi state and accused Kiev’s leaders of carrying out a neo-Nazi “genocide” against the millions Ukrainian native speakers of Russian.

He has done this without providing evidence, and there is no evidence for his claims. Kiev and its Western allies call this an unfounded pretext for a takeover war.

In June, Putin told an economic forum in St. Petersburg, again without evidence, that some Jews viewed Zelenskiy as a disgrace to their people, interrupting his own speech to show news footage of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine.

And in January, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov received a sharp rebuke from the White House for accusing Washington of convening European countries to solve “the Russian question” in the same way that Adolf Hitler had a “final solution.” sought to exterminate the European 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 that his so-called “special military operation” is an attempt to “denazify” a belligerent imperial power backed by the West.

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

Zelensky — who is Jewish and speaks Russian and says members of his family were killed by Nazi Germany in World War II — was democratically elected in 2019 with more than 70 percent of the vote.

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

No party that formed a far-right coalition in Ukraine won enough votes to take a proportional seat in the country’s parliament. The Svoboda party, a far-right nationalist party, managed to secure one seat in the constituency.

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

“We strongly reject the equating of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime by the Russian government to justify its unprovoked aggression,” the report said.

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

The statement said that while Ukraine, like any country, “has right-wing extremists and violent xenophobic groups,” “none of this justifies Russian aggression and gross mischaracterization of Ukraine.”

The statement was signed by hundreds more historians and scientists.

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

The far right is strongly represented among pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, with several former and current leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics associated with neo-Nazi, white supremacist and ultra-nationalist groups.

The West says that Putin’s invasion is nothing but an imperialistic land grab by Russia for the purpose of wiping out a sovereign nation.

Hundreds of thousands have died in his war that began in February 2022, which initially aimed to take the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and overthrow the Zelensky government before annexing the entire country.

Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleh Nikolenko accused Putin and the Russian elite of “deeply rooted anti-Semitism.”

“We call on the world to strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements of the Russian president,” he said.

“In the modern world there should be no place for hatred on ethnic grounds.”

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mychailo Podolyak said Putin himself was disgusted “when he tries to justify mass crimes against citizens of another country with a monstrous lie.”

Some estimates suggest that by the end of 1942, 1.7 million Soviet Jews—mostly from Russia and Ukraine—were murdered by the German Nazis and their collaborators.

But others say the figure is much higher: From Ukraine alone, between 850,000 and 1.6 million Jews are murdered by Nazi Germany.

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

In 2014, that number was estimated at about 400,000.