Residents of the Ukrainian city of Odessa carrying sandbags to defend against Russian attack. Photo: Reuters/Nacho Doce

The Jewish community in the Ukrainian port city of Odessa has castigated Russian President Vladimir Putin for fabricating the claim that Ukraine is led by “neo-Nazis” in order to justify a “massacre” throughout the country.

A statement from Odessa Regional Association of Jews on Monday argued that the “aggression of the Russian armed forces against the sovereign Ukrainian state, ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, is based on a set of pseudo-historical and political inventions of the historians, political scientists and propagandists in his pocket.”

The statement — issued by the organization’s head, Roman Schwartzman — accused the Russian regime of “lying that Nazi collaborators are the leading force in Ukraine, not a democratically elected government.”

It continued: “This lie is an excuse for a massacre organized by the Russian armed forces throughout sovereign Ukraine.”

The statement emphasized that survivors of the Holocaust had also joined in the condemnation of Russia’s invasion and its accompanying propaganda.

“We, members of the Odessa Regional Association of Jews, former ghetto prisoners and Nazi concentration camps, miraculously survived the Holocaust and, unlike Vladimir Putin, were horrified by the war and know what real Nazism is,” it said.

A major center of Jewish life in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the city of Odessa has been bracing for the deadly Russian assault seen across Ukraine over the last three weeks. On Monday, the city’s Mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, expressed the fear that Russian forces would soon surround Odessa on three fronts.

Trukhanov said that Russian forces could seek to advance from eastern Ukraine to create a land link with the unrecognized breakaway republic of Transnistria, officially a part of neighboring Moldova, where a Russian army contingent is also based. Such a move would cut off Odessa from the rest of Ukraine, he said.

Odessa residents have meanwhile continued to prepare their city’s defenses from a Russian attack. More than 400,000 sandbags have been filled by volunteers and distributed around the city.

The French Jewish philosopher and human rights advocate Bernard-Henri Lévy, who is currently in Odessa, on Monday tweeted a tribute to Odessa’s “valiant air defense forces” amid warnings of imminent Russian airstrikes.

Random BHL sighting! (In Odessa…) pic.twitter.com/bIEWKGMmxa

— Mark MacKinnon (@markmackinnon) March 14, 2022