Vladimir Putin, his top officials, and state-sponsored propagandists have found a potent, time-tested weapon in their war with Ukraine—antisemitism.
As they continue to press the three-year-long offensive against Ukraine and its Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky, Putin et al. have weaponized centuries-old tropes that portray Jews as rootless, godless cosmopolitans hellbent on oppressing the faithful.
The latest of Putin’s antisemitic pronouncements was featured in his televised end-of-year press conference on December 19, 2024.
Answering a question about the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, Putin characterized Ukrainian leaders as an unsavory bunch:
“These are people without any faith—God-deniers. They are ethnic Jews, but has anyone seen them inside a synagogue? Nor are they Russian Orthodox, because they don’t appear in churches either. Nor are they espousing Islamic faith, that’s for sure, because it’s unlikely that they make appearances at mosques. These are people without ancestry, without a tribe. They don’t share the values that we hold dear and that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian people hold dear.”
If you bought this warped version of history, you might end up believing that the invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with Putin’s dreams of territorial expansion. Rather, it was a purehearted effort to free that country from the Antichrist’s filthy grasp.
There are many Jews in the Russian president’s orbit. Some have even called him a philosemite. As is often the case with philosemites, Putin is prone to drawing a distinction between “good” Jews and “bad.” It doesn’t help that he seems to view himself as something of a historian and a philosopher, and as he spins out his often peculiar pronouncements on Jewish-related topics, there is no reliable way to trace precisely how they combine in his mind (or in the minds of listeners) with the echoes of blood libel, Nazi ideology, and radical Islamic notions about Jews.
Here’s some more of what you hear from Putin and his circle, drawn from a new report by the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union (UCSJ), a human rights organization formed a half a century ago to advocate for refuseniks, and of which I’m the current president:
- On June 16, 2022, Putin claimed that his “Jewish friends” think Ukraine’s president Zelensky is “a shame upon the Jewish people,” then immediately moved on to a soliloquy on Ukraine’s (Jewish) “neo-Nazis” and “Hitler’s heirs.”
- On May 1, 2022, Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, noted that “Hitler had Jewish blood” and that “the most virulent antisemites as a rule are Jews,” essentially recasting fascism and the Holocaust as a Jewish civil war.
- On September 5, 2022, Putin revisited this theme, stating that “Western curators gave the leading role in today’s Ukraine to an ethnic Jew, a man with Jewish roots, stemming from Jewish ancestry…This makes the current situation utterly disgusting, because this ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and those who years ago conducted the Holocaust in Ukraine.”
- On September 6, 2022, the propagandist Vladimir Solovyov noted that “when the Jew Blinken comes to visit the Jew Zelensky in order to discuss the actions of the de facto Nazi troops against Russia, this speaks volumes about what’s taking place.” (Solovyov also happens to be of Jewish ancestry.)
This nonsense is all the more ominous because the pogroms that swept through the Pale of Settlement more than a century ago were the outgrowth of official and church propaganda targeting Jews as the source of all adversity that befalls Russia. However, there is a difference between then and now: While the czar’s secret police (the Okhrana) played a role in inciting pogroms, today the most bizarre antisemitic pronouncements emanate from the “czar” himself.
Antisemitism is best understood in relation to historical landmarks.
In the United States and Western and Central Europe, the key recent landmark is October 7, 2023, and the backlash against Israel’s response to the attack by Hamas militants. In Russia and Ukraine, the landmark date is February 24, 2022, the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and, with it, the beginning of the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II.
Antisemitism in Russia and Ukraine differs fundamentally from what we see in the West. Here, much of the recent upsurge in antisemitism has emanated from the political left, largely intertwined with the backlash against Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. (According to a tally by the Anti-Defamation League, more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents took place in the United States in the year following the October 7 attack, roughly a 200 percent increase over the previous year.)
In Russia and Ukraine, antisemitism still emanates predominantly from the political right—from the fascists, ultranationalists and adherents of conservative religious movements.
Propaganda and name-calling are among the weapons deployed in the Russia-Ukraine war. Regrettably, the f-word—“fascism”—gets used liberally by both sides. The Russian side refers to “Ukro-fascists,” while the Ukrainian side strikes back by combining “Russia” and “fascist” to get “Russist” (pronounced Rashist), and the names Putin and Hitler to get “Putler.”
The UCSJ-sponsored study is designed to compare recent trends in antisemitism in Russia and Ukraine, with the aim of setting up systematic monitoring of antisemitism in the entire former Soviet space.
The study is titled “They Are Ethnic Jews: Antisemitism and Attitudes Toward Israel in Russia and Ukraine (2022–2024)” and was conducted by Vyacheslav Likhachev, a political scientist, journalist and historian. One section of the report highlights incidents of antisemitism in both countries, which may at first seem minuscule compared with those in other countries. (It’s possible, of course, that the reporting mechanisms in Russia and Ukraine are not as robust as they are in the West.) In Ukraine, Likhachev’s UCSJ report found five cases of antisemitic vandalism in 2022, three cases in 2023, and four in 2024.
In the most recent reported incident of vandalism, on the night of December 31, 2024, in the city of Mykolaiv, Ukraine, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the façade of a synagogue, scorching the door of the main entryway. The fire was put out by a guard.
No antisemitic violence against individuals was reported in Ukraine during that period.
In Russia, in 2022, five cases of antisemitic vandalism and no cases of violence were reported, but in 2023, there were two reported cases of vandalism and one case of violence. Importantly, the 2023 cases were not isolated events, such as throwing a brick through a synagogue window or spray-painting a slur on a Jewish-owned business.
Arguably as a response to Putin’s historical revisionism and the crude diatribes of the propagandists featured on Program One, they appear to include incidents of terrorism, synagogue burnings, and massive public actions, including a pogrom of sorts, on October 29, 2023, when at least a thousand men took over an international airport in Makhachkala, in the Russian republic of Dagestan. The mob swarmed the terminal and the airfield to search for arriving Israeli airplanes.
Not all of the instances listed in the UCSJ report can be definitively linked to antisemitism, and in some cases the link relies on uncheckable assertions by third parties. With that caveat, here are some highlights:
- On March 7, 2024, a group of terrorists attacked a Moscow concert hall, killing at least 145 people. According to official reports, the terrorists were also planning an attack—and slaughter of worshippers—at a Moscow area synagogue.
- On April 11, 2024, Russian security services reported the killing of a would-be terrorist who was alleged to have been making improvised explosive devices for an attack on a synagogue.
- On June 23, 2024, two attacks that can be partially ascribed to antisemitism occurred in the Dagestan region of Russia. In the city of Derbent, a mob of Islamic militants attacked a synagogue, killing two private security guards, wounding a police officer and using bottles of flammable liquids to ignite the synagogue. Simultaneously, in Makhachkala, an apparently connected mob attacked that city’s synagogue, using Molotov cocktails to ignite a fire.
Altogether, 22 people died in the two Dagestan attacks, which were also aimed at Christian houses of worship and a state inspection station for vehicles. The dead included a priest, whose throat was slit by the terrorists.
As the situation in Russia and Ukraine evolves, data on the morphing of antisemitism in the region can be lifesaving. Tracking these manifestations of hatred gives its intended victims an opportunity to prepare, setting off alarms before the mobs begin to form and Molotov cocktails are flung.
Paul Goldberg is the author of The Dissident, a novel, and president of the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union (UCSJ).
Top image credit: UCSJ.