Leader of self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic says country’s historical nationalists ‘would turn in their graves if they could see who is running Ukraine’.
Ukraine’s pro-Russian rebel chief on Monday branded the country’s leaders “miserable” Jews in an apparent anti-Semitic jibe.
Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, claimed that Kiev’s pro-Western leaders were “miserable representatives of the great Jewish people”.
“I can’t remember a time when Cossacks were led by people who have never held a sword in their hands,” Zakharchenko told a press conference in the eastern rebel stronghold of Donetsk, in a reference to Ukraine’s nationalist forebears, the Cossacks.
Zakharchenko said that the country’s historical nationalists “would turn in their graves if they could see who is running Ukraine.”
Anti-Semitic sentiment remains widespread in Ukraine, where leaders are commonly labelled as Jewish by those seeking to discredit them.
The comments by Zakharchenko, who was flanked by the leader of the neighboring rebel-held region of Lugansk, Igor Plotnitsky, were carried live by Russian news channel Rossiya-24.
The rebels leaders on Monday announced a mass call-up, aimed at bolstering their forces to 100,000 troops.
Fighting between Ukrainian forces and the pro-Russian rebels, which has claimed 5,100 lives since April, has surged in recent weeks after the collapse of a tenuous ceasefire deal.
This has always been our problem, at least in the Diaspora. We are perceived as being weak. We should always have a “sword” on hand and know how and when to use it.
I don’t think Zakharchenko got it wrong, terming some of the Kiev gang as “miserable representatives of the great Jewish people”. Who among us doesn’t know for a fact that the same kind of description could be applied to the liberal Judenraten of the USA who routinely oppose or only half-heartedly support the interests of Israel, and in so doing, sell out the Jewish nation, because they instinctually but incorrectly imagine that by doing so, they will win praise among the goyim who, because of this, despise and distrust them all the more?
I want Israel to have close relations with the Russian state and the Russian nation. But that doesn’t mean that I think large numbers of Jews should reside in their country, when in fact, they are needed only in one place — the State of Israel.
In any case, all my life I have wanted us to be the great Jewish people that Zakharchenko said he regards us. But that has to be earned by deeds, and not be somebody else’s affirmative action, which never accomplished to much of anything for America’s blacks and usually backfires for Jews when some non-Jewish leader pumps us up with temporary favors.
You would think by now that all Jews have learned the lessons about Jewish diaspora life that Theodor Herzl learned at the degradation in Paris of the innocent but Jewish Captain Dreyfus in the 1890s. He was in fact a fine artillery expert and general staff officer, but served a national institution that distrusted Jews.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
This is good news, now the Jews own their own country in Europe. It’s just like the good old days when they owned Germany and Austria. Jews can now escape Europe and make Aliyah to Ukraine as well.
The really amazing thing is how the few remaining Jews in Ukraine managed to get hold of the country. It seems there were only 67,000 Jews there in 2014 (0.14%) and lately many have been fleeing the fighting.
Down from 840,000 in 1959. A steadily Jewless country owned by the Jews – neat trick!
Great place for Jews to go back to, is it not?
That is what not few Jews did after the Holocaust. Mental basket cases.
France is just a bit of veneer cover away from being the same. England right in there. And where else can we look into next?