In a televised address Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his "special military operation" would seek the "demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine."
Putin's comments refer to the Kremlin's allegation that Ukraine's military is run by neo-Nazis and is a threat to Russia, The New York Times reported.
The goal "will be to defend people who for eight years are suffering persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime," Putin said. "For this we will aim for demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, as well as taking to court those who carried out multiple bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation."
In a Thursday tweet, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer noted that democratically elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.
"In his attempt to justify the unjustifiable, #Russia's assault on #Ukraine, Putin referred to a fictional genocide & set goal of 'denazification of Ukraine,' a country that overwhelmingly elected a Jew president," Pifer said. "Goebbels & Hitler would have been impressed."
Responding to Putin's statement on Wednesday, Zelenskyy said, "You are told we are Nazis, but how can a people support Nazis that gave more than 8 million lives for the victory over Nazism?"
"How can I be a Nazi?" he continued. "Tell my grandpa, who went through the whole war in the infantry of the Soviet Army and died as a colonel in independent Ukraine."
Putin also said he was acting on behalf of "people who identify as Russians and want to preserve their identity, language and culture."
These people are "getting the signal that they are not wanted in Ukraine," the Russian president said.
"The policy to root out the Russian language and culture and promote assimilation carries on," he said on Monday. "The Verkhovna Rada has generated a steady flow of discriminatory bills, and the law on the so-called indigenous people has already come into force."
France 24 reported in 2019 that Zelenskyy is from the central city of Kryvyi Rih and speaks fluent Russian.
Claiming that Russia does not intend to occupy Ukraine, Putin said he was acting after receiving a plea for aid from the leaders of the Russian-backed separatist territories formed in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
"We have no evidence of Ukrainian aggression or, as Putin talked about in his speech the other day, of 'genocide' by the Ukrainian army," Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center, told PBS News. "There's just no evidence that any of this exists."
In 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, Putin claimed to be protecting ethnic Russians. The United States rejected the Kremlin's allegations at the time that they were threatened.
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