The Russian foreign minister has accused the Ukrainian leader of abandoning his earlier peace platform in favor of hardline nationalism
Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelesnky, who is ethnically Jewish, is a traitor to his own people for siding with the far-right, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has stated, suggesting that Kiev’s Western backers pushed him in that direction.
Following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin described the “denazification” of the neighboring country as one of the goals of Moscow’s military action.
Speaking to Russian media on Sunday, Lavrov expressed skepticism regarding plans voiced by several European NATO member states to deploy “peacekeepers” to Ukraine. The diplomat claimed that Western powers would in reality instead be “inciting the Kiev regime to [go to] war against us.” He cited the failed Minsk agreements, which were signed in 2014 and 2015, and were supposed to stop the fighting between Ukraine and the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. Germany and France were the guarantors of the accords but later publicly admitted that they had only signed them to buy Kiev time to build up its military.
According to Lavrov, Western powers had “first brought [former President Pyotr] Poroshenko to power on their bayonets, and then Zelensky.” The official suggested that the same Western enablers had been the driving force behind Zelensky’s abrupt abandonment of the pro-peace platform he campaigned on in 2019.
“Zelensky did a 180 from a person who came to power on slogans of peace… and in half a year turned into a pure Nazi, and as Russian President Vladimir Putin rightly said – a traitor to the Jewish people,” Lavrov said.
Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in June 2023, Putin stated that his friends in the Jewish community “say that Zelensky is not a Jew, he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.” He pointed to the fact that the current Ukrainian authorities openly celebrate Nazi figures, most notably Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who collaborated with the Third Reich during World War II.
Later that year, the Russian president alleged that “Western handlers placed at the head of modern Ukraine an ethnic Jew… [to cover up] the anti-human basis of the current Ukrainian state.”
“That makes the entire situation so highly disgusting,” Putin added, noting that the Nazis exterminated some 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine during World War II.
