Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has accused Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky of betraying his Jewish heritage by aligning with far-right nationalist forces, suggesting that Western powers pushed him in that direction.
Speaking to Russian media on Sunday, Lavrov criticized European NATO member states’ proposals to deploy so-called peacekeepers in Ukraine, claiming their real aim was to escalate the conflict rather than promote stability. He linked this to what he called the West’s broader strategy of using Ukraine against Russia, citing the failed Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 as an example of Western duplicity.
Lavrov alleged that Western backers first installed Petro Poroshenko as Ukraine’s leader and later brought Zelensky to power, only to pressure him into abandoning his original pro-peace platform from the 2019 presidential campaign.
“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,” Lavrov stated. He echoed President Vladimir Putin’s past remarks, calling Zelensky “a traitor to the Jewish people.”
Putin has previously made similar claims, arguing that Zelensky’s leadership serves as a cover for Ukraine’s nationalist agenda. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2023, Putin stated that his Jewish friends view Zelensky as “a disgrace to the Jewish people.” He pointed to Kyiv’s veneration of figures like Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era nationalist leader who collaborated with Nazi Germany.
Putin later accused Ukraine’s Western handlers of deliberately placing an ethnic Jew at the helm of the country to obscure its alleged “anti-human” ideology.
“That makes the entire situation so highly disgusting,” Putin remarked, recalling that 1.5 million Jews were exterminated in Ukraine during the Holocaust.
