Kremlin aide Sergei Glazyev has said a passage on an obscure nationalist website in which he entertained the possibility that Ukraine’s new president could populate the country’s war-torn southeastern region with Jews has been falsely interpreted.
Glazyev, an economic adviser to President Vladimir Putin, wrote that Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s presidency could lead to “mass movement into southeast Ukrainian land ‘cleansed’ of the Russian population by the inhabitants of the Promised Land” on Monday. The Kremlin distanced itself from his comments, with its spokesman saying the opinion piece represented Glazyev’s “personal opinion.”
“We’re not only talking about Jews, but the inhabitants of Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon [and] Jordan beset by permanent war,” Glazyev said on Tuesday in comments to the fontanka.ru news website.
“There are not only Jews among them, but also Christians as well as Muslims that reject jihad.”
“These are distortions and insinuations unrelated to the content of the article,” Glazyev told Russia’s state-run TASS news agency later on Tuesday.
The “manufactured scandal” around his blog post aims to continue “the genocide of the Russian population in Ukraine” as well as to “inflame hatred between the Russian and Ukrainian people,” he added.
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