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Putin’s critics have called him anti-Semitic, pointing to parallels with the anti-Semitism of the Soviet state under Joseph Stalin.
Vladimir Putin accused Jews of attacking the Russian Orthodox Church and warned they lacked family and “roots,” the Russian leader’s latest anti-Semite since his 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Putin made this accusation at his long annual press conference before the New Year, which lasted four hours on Thursday. Amid the event, Putin spoke of punitive moves opposed to the Russian Orthodox Church in other parts of Europe. connected to the Putin regime, and its leaders have been expelled from countries such as Bulgaria and Estonia.
Putin said the church was “being tortured” — and blamed Jews.
“They are pushing the Church aside, but they are not even atheists,” Putin said. “They are other people without beliefs, atheists, they are of Jewish ethnicity, but have you seen them in a synagogue?I don’t think so. “
After adding that the alleged opponents of the church were also neither Orthodox Christian nor Muslim, he added, “These are people without kin or memory, with no roots. They don’t cherish what we cherish and the majority of the Ukrainian people cherish as well.”
Critics of Putin decried the statement as antisemitic, noting parallels to Soviet state antisemitism under Josef Stalin, when the Kremlin persecuted Jews and accused them of being “rootless cosmopolitans.”
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the former leader rabbi of Moscow who left Russia after refusing to the invasion of Ukraine, tweeted that Putin was “reviving Soviet-era tropes like ‘rootless cosmopolitans “” and referred to the “Doctors’ Plot”, some other of Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaigns.
“This echoes the Stalinist anti-Semitic rhetoric of the ‘doctors’ plot’ (1948-1953),” he wrote. “History teaches us: we will have to fight hate. We call on European leaders to condemn these statements!
Putin and his deputies have employed antisemitic rhetoric in their arguments for their invasion of Ukraine. Although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish, Putin has claimed that Ukraine is led by a “neo-Nazi regime.”
In the press conference, Putin also blamed the ouster of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad on Iran. Assad was an ally of Russia and is now living in exile there. Putin said he planned to meet with Assad but had not yet. He also said he was open to meeting with President-elect Donald Trump.
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