The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has said the latest statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s Jewish roots are "another manifestation of deep-rooted anti-Semitism of the Russian elites."
The ministry said on September 5 that Putin has a chronic fixation on the ethnic origin of the Ukrainian president and his statement shows that he connects Zelenskiy's Jewish origins with the "heroization of Nazism."
Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleh Nikolenko said Ukraine called on the world to strongly condemn Putin's anti-Semitic statements.
"There should be no place for ethnic hatred in today's world," Nikolenko said on Facebook.
Putin said in comments broadcast on Russian television that Western powers had installed Zelenskiy as president of Ukraine to cover up the glorification of Nazism. He presented no evidence for his allegation.
Moscow has previously accused Kyiv's leaders of pursuing a neo-Nazi "genocide" of Ukraine's native Russian speakers in seeking to justify its attack on Ukraine. Putin himself called the "denazification" of Ukraine the goal of the full-scale invasion.
Kyiv and its Western allies have called the accusations a baseless pretext for a war that only seeks to expand Russian territory, and human rights activists and representatives of the Jewish community have condemned such statements in the past.
Putin said Western powers had "put a person at the head of modern Ukraine -- an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins. And thus, in my opinion, they seem to be covering up an anti-human essence that is the foundation...of the modern Ukrainian state.
"And this makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in that an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and covering up those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine at one time -- and this is the extermination of 1.5 million people."
Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak, asked for comment by Reuters, said Putin himself was disgusting "when he tries to justify mass crimes against citizens of another country with a monstrous lie."
Putin in June tried to draw parallels between the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust during World War II and Ukraine's current democratically elected government, telling an economic forum in St. Petersburg, also without evidence, that some Jews considered Zelenskiy a disgrace to their people.