The Ukrainian leader wanted to exploit the memory of the genocide to advance his goals, Dani Dayan has said
Dani Dayan, chairman of the Jerusalem-based World Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem, has said it was the right decision to reject a request from Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky to deliver a speech at the institution.
Soon after the Ukraine conflict escalated in February 2022, Kiev’s ambassador to Israel approached the center with a request. He asked that Zelensky be allowed to address members of the national legislature and other officials at the site during an event, which would be broadcast internationally. The request was turned down.
According to Dayan, he expected Zelensky to draw parallels between the Holocaust and the Ukraine conflict – something that the chairman found unacceptable. “I immediately understood what he was getting at,” Dayan told the German newspaper NOZ in an interview published on Saturday. “Not every war crime is genocide, and not every genocide is a Holocaust.”
The chairman also admitted that he would likely have had to interfere and “interrupt” Zelensky during the event to prevent the Ukrainian leader from distorting history. “In Ukraine, there were not only victims of the Holocaust. Ukrainians were also [Nazi] accomplices, and, in some cases, primary perpetrators,” Dayan told NOZ, adding that cancelling the event was the “right” thing to do.
Russia has long accused Kiev of promoting neo-Nazism and glorifying Nazi collaborators, including the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) that waged a mass killing campaign between 1943 and 1945 against Poles and Jews, in which more than 100,000 people perished.
Moscow has repeatedly warned of a Nazi revival in Ukraine and cited “denazification” as one of the main goals of its military operation against Kiev.
Zelensky tried nonetheless to portray Ukraine as the victim of a Holocaust-like genocide when he addressed Israeli legislators and officials via a video conference in March 2022. His choice of words sparked a wave of indignation among the politicians. Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich branded it an “infuriating and ridiculous comparison.”
Israel’s communications minister at the time, Yoaz Hendel, called it “outrageous” and then MP Yuval Steinitz stated that Zelensky’s words were close to “Holocaust denial” and amounted to a “complete distortion of history.”
