Russian President Vladimir Putin has intensified his attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, stating, "Western powers installed him, and he is Jewish, as president of Ukraine to conceal a tendency to glorify Nazism and cover it up." This is not the first time Putin has attempted to link the democratically elected Ukrainian government to the mass killing of Ukrainian Jews during World War II by Nazi German occupation forces and their local partners in then-Soviet Ukraine.
In a televised interview, Putin said, "The Western guardians have placed a person of Jewish ethnicity and roots at the head of modern Ukraine... In my opinion, it seems that they are covering up an inhuman nature, and that is the basis of... modern Ukrainian statehood." He added, "This makes the entire situation extremely disgusting, as an ethnic Jew covers up the glorification of Nazism and those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine at one time—I mean the extermination of one and a half million people."
In response to a request for comment, Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak stated that Putin himself is disgusting "when he tries to justify mass crimes against the citizens of another country with a monstrous lie."
