Former Russian president and Security Council chief Dmitry Medvedev has lambasted Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, claiming the politician has turned his back on his Jewish ancestry by courting the support of the far-right.
In a series of extraordinary attacks penned as part of a column published on Monday in Moscow daily Kommersant, Medvedev argued that Ukraine is searching for a clear sense of its purpose and its history, “but Ukrainian leaders, especially top officials, have no stable identity of their own. They are unhappy people.”
“Which country are they citizens of? Where are their roots? What is their historical identity? Ethnicity? What gods do they pray to? Are they Ukrainians? ‘Europeans'? Russians? Jews? Tatars? Hungarians? Karaites?” he pondered.
“The current president of this shattered country is a person with certain ethnic roots. He spoke Russian all his life. He worked in Russia and made a good living with money from Russian sources. Nevertheless, having been made head of state, out of fear of a Maidan being directed against his personal power, his political and moral compass has shifted,” Medvedev alleged. “He renounced his identity. He has begun to earnestly serve the most rabid nationalist forces in Ukraine.”
“One can only imagine how nauseating it would have been for him to have to perform such a fatal somersault,” the former Russian president went on. “It is reminiscent of the insane situation where members of the Jewish intelligentsia in Nazi Germany were asked to serve in the SS.”
Moscow has consistently accused Zelensky of courting support from far-right, anti-Russian, nationalist groups in order to stay in power. Last year, the former TV comedian was accused of turning down an invitation to a Holocaust memorial event in Jerusalem out of fear of angering anti-semitic factions back home.
In recent years, the country has come under fire from foreign observers for a series of events and tributes dedicated to historical figures implicated in WWII genocides. Earlier this year, activists staged a torchlight parade in support of Stepan Bandera, held up by many as the architect of Ukrainian independence. Bandera led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which collaborated with the Nazis in the fight against the Soviet Red Army and was responsible for the mass killings of Jews and ethnic Poles during a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
In April, Kiev again courted controversy by allowing a march in honor of the SS Galicia unit, which fought for Hitler, to go ahead. The Israeli embassy slammed the event as glorifying soldiers who were “involved in some of the worst crimes that took place during the Holocaust.”
Last year, an RT investigation revealed that at least one far-right group was receiving taxpayer funding to stage war-games with young Ukrainians in order to “propagate the ideas of Ukrainian nationalism” and fight in hand-to-hand combat. The group, the Youth Nationalist Congress, brands the exercises as “patriotic education” and boasts that its graduates have gone on to fight in the war-torn Donetsk region in the country’s east.
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October 11, 2021 at 02:27AM
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Ukrainian President Zelensky sold himself to nationalists like a Jewish soldier fighting for Nazis in WWII – ex-Russian president
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