Comment by Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s address to the Israeli Knesset

Vladimir Zelensky’s March 20 video appeal to the members of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) evoked utter astonishment, to put it mildly, including among those to whom it was addressed. The reason is the Ukrainian leader’s clumsy attempts to play upon the World War II tragedy of the Jewish people by drawing far-fetched parallels between the Holocaust and the current developments in Ukraine. 

Essentially, Zelensky has carried the situation to the point of absurdity by comparing Russia to the Third Reich – Russia, which made a decisive contribution to the victory over Hitler’s Germany at the cost of millions of lives. In a bid to put psychological pressure on his audience, he only caused perplexity by equating the start of the special military operation in Ukraine and the creation of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1920. He invented some perfidious schemes of Moscow’s, designed to bring about “the final solution to the Ukrainian question.” He went as far as to compare these inventions to the Nazis’ inhuman, barbaric crimes against Jews.  The words “Holocaust” and “Baby Yar,” words full of tragedy for every Jew, became objects of his vile manipulations. The Ukrainian president unashamedly gambled on the alleged “interweaving of histories” of the Ukrainian and Jewish people and on a “common threat” of their “total elimination.” 

Vladimir Zelensky seems unaware of the fact that it was the Jews living in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic who felt the full impact of the blow delivered by the Nazi hordes during the Great Patriotic War. It was they who faced physical extermination that was being methodically fulfilled by, among others, the local [Ukrainian] henchmen, such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Polissya Sich, and others. And it was only due to the adamant determination and might of the Red Army, where Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and members of the USSR’s other ethnic groups fought shoulder to shoulder against the Nazis, that it proved possible to thwart the heinous plans of the Third Reich and its satellites.

It is this memory that unites Jews, Russians and Ukrainians, who are true to their traditions and historical heritage. Extremists and nationalists, the disciples and followers of Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, for whom both we and the Jewish people have no definition other than “accomplices in the Holocaust,” will not succeed in befouling this heritage, no matter what lying remarks are invented by the ideologists of the current Ukrainian regime headed by Vladimir Zelensky.

No one should have any doubt that the Ukrainian neo-Nazis of today are in no way different from their WWII ideological predecessors. This is corroborated by ample evidence, including the tragedies of May 2, 2014, in Odessa, and May 9, 2014, in Mariupol, as well as the present-day events, such as the humanitarian disaster the Ukrainian nationalist battalions engineered in Mariupol, their use of peaceful civilians as “human shields,” missile strikes at cities in Donbass with the use of banned cluster munitions, and more. One discerns in all these atrocities the same fiendish method of operation targeting innocent people, a method characteristic of those stooges who perpetrated heinous crimes on behalf of the German Nazis during World War II.