Published: 20 June 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Russian President attacked Ukrainian President’s Jewish roots, simultaneously claiming he is not Jewish and that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.
On Friday, Vladimir Putin claimed Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, is viewed as a “disgrace” to his faith by other members of the religion.
“I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin told an annual economic forum in Saint Petersburg. “They say that Zelenskyy is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.”
“This is not a joke and not an attempt at irony, because today neo-Nazis, Hitler’s disciples, have been put on a pedestal as heroes of Ukraine,” Putin added, according to the TASS Russian News Agency.
Putin described Zelenskyy as “a man with Jewish blood” who “covers for these freaks, these neo-Nazis, with his actions.”
Zelenskyy, was born to Jewish parents in Kryvyi Rih, in a family which lost relatives in the Holocaust.
He has repeatedly dismissed as false Russian accusations that he has supported neo-Nazis in Ukraine. His great-grandfather and three of his grandfather’s brothers were killed after the Nazis invaded Ukrainian territory. They had joined the Red Army to fight the Nazis and his grandfather was the only one of the four brothers to survive.
Zelenskyy has said he had an “ordinary Soviet Jewish upbringing,” with little religious content because religion did not officially exist in the Soviet state.
“I never speak about religion and I never speak about God because I have my own personal opinion about it,” he said. “Of course, I believe in God. But I speak with him only in those moments which are personal for me.”
Well-known Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk responded to Putin on Facebook.
