Russian President Vladimir Putin has been accused of anti-Semitism after he said that “ethnic Jews” were seeking to “tear apart” the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian leader’s controversial comments, made during his annual year-end press conference in Moscow on December 19, were the latest in a series of similar outbursts since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that have either directly or indirectly targeted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish.
“These are people without any convictions, atheists. They are ethnic Jews, but has anyone seen them in a synagogue? I don't think so,” Putin said during the flagship event, which is broadcast live on Russian state television and traditionally lasts for hours. “These are people without kinship and memory, without roots. They do not value what we value, and what the majority of the Ukrainian people value.”
Putin’s comments come as Ukrainian authorities seek to curb the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, which is seen as closely aligned with the Kremlin. The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, has been a vocal supporter of the invasion since 2022, which he has sought to defend on spiritual grounds. His support for the war has shocked many and drawn international criticism, with Pope Francis warning him not to become “Putin’s altar boy.”
Many commentators have noted the similarities between Putin’s recent attack on “rootless” people and Stalin’s earlier Soviet-era persecution of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.” The Kremlin leader’s comments also have troubling echoes of Russia’s most notorious anti-Semitic forgery, the early twentieth-century Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which alleged a Jewish plot to take over the world by infiltrating and destroying Western institutions.
Putin and his Kremlin colleagues have faced multiple accusations of anti-Semitism since 2022 as they have sought to defend Moscow’s claims of “denazification” of Ukraine, despite its popularly elected Jewish president and its role as an important site for Jewish pilgrims. This toxic trend has included frequent attacks on Zelensky’s Jewish heritage. “I have many Jewish friends,” Putin said in June 2023. “They say Zelensky is not a Jew, that he disgraces the Jewish people. I am not joking.”
Following those comments, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum accused the Russian leader of repeatedly using “anti-Semitic lies” to justify his invasion of Ukraine. American officials were equally critical. “President Zelenskyy’s Jewishness has no bearing on the situation in Ukraine, and Putin’s continued focus on it and the ‘denazification’ narrative are clearly intended to distract from Russia’s aggressive war against the Ukrainian people,” Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism, commented in 2023.
Such insults regularly appear in Kremlin-controlled Russian state media, and leading propagandists such as Vladimir Solovyov have been known to question the authenticity of Zelensky’s Jewish identity. Meanwhile, in the early months of the spring 2022 invasion, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded to a question about the absurdity of “denazifying” a country with a Jewish leader by declaring that Adolf Hitler “also had Jewish blood.” Lavrov’s remarks sparked outrage and were called “inexcusable” by Israeli officials.
Many in the Jewish community see Putin’s latest provocative comments as part of a larger trend that legitimizes anti-Semitic tropes and raises serious security concerns. “This is just one example of his regime’s clear and virulent anti-Semitism, which has intensified since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022,” said Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis and former chief rabbi of Moscow, who fled Russia after the attack on Ukraine after coming under pressure to publicly support the invasion. In December 2022, Goldschmidt warned of rising anti-Semitism in Putin’s Russia and advised Jews to leave the country.
Now, Goldschmidt is calling on the international community to take notice of the anti-Semitic rhetoric emanating from the Kremlin. “As a representative of Jewish communities across Europe and someone who was forced to flee his home and community in Moscow, I call on Europe and the free world to unequivocally condemn President Putin’s dangerous propaganda before it spreads further,” he said.
Joshua Stein is a PhD researcher at the University of Calgary.
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