Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with the head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Alexander Shokhin in Moscow, Russia March 2, 2022. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) on Saturday condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “is not a Jew, but a disgrace to the Jewish people.”

“Vladimir Putin has repeatedly employed antisemitic lies and distorted the Holocaust to justify his brutal invasion of Ukraine,” the USHMM wrote on Twitter. “We condemn his recent remarks denigrating Ukrainian President Zelensky and the Jewish people.”

Speaking at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum on Friday, Putin was asked in an interview why he continues to refer to the Ukrainian government as a “Nazi” regime.

“I have many Jewish friends since childhood,” Putin said. “They say Zelensky is not a Jew, but a disgrace to the Jewish people. And this is not a joke, not irony. After all, neo-Nazis, the followers of Hitler, have been erected on the podium as heroes of Ukraine today. The Holocaust is a murder of six million Jews, and one and a half million were destroyed in Ukraine, above all by the hands of Banderites.”

Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian far-right partisan leader and antisemite who collaborated with the Nazis, has been frequently invoked by Putin since Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014 because of Bandera’s lionization by some Ukrainians for his legacy as a Ukrainian nationalist. Putin has claimed that the invasion of Ukraine is an effort at “demilitarization and denazification.”

US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt on Friday also condemned Putin’s remarks.

“President Zelensky’s Jewishness has nothing to do with the situation in Ukraine and Putin’s continued focus on this topic and “denazification” narrative is clearly intended to distract from Russia’s war of aggression against the Ukrainian people,” she said.

Zelensky has frequently cited his Jewish heritage and his family’s suffering in the Holocaust in interactions with foreign leaders.

In January 2020 at an Israeli commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Zelensky told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a story “about a family of four brothers.”

“Three of them, their parents and their families became victims of the Holocaust. All of them were shot by German occupiers who invaded Ukraine,” he said. “The fourth brother survived… Two years after the war, he had a son, and in 31 years, he had a grandson. In 40 more years, that grandson became president, and he is standing before you today, Mr. Prime Minister.”