Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Western powers had framed Volodymyr Zelenskyi, who is of Jewish descent, to “cover up the glorification of Nazism”, Sky News reported.

Earlier, the Russian president called his invasion of Ukraine an attempt to “denazify” the country.

Before Russian troops entered Ukraine last year, Putin claimed, without evidence, that Ukrainians “faced humiliation and genocide by the Kyiv regime” and that a “special military operation” was a means of “protecting” them.

Putin’s comments about Zelensky today were in response to a question posed to him on Russian state television.

“Western protectors put a person at the head of modern Ukraine – an ethnic Jew with Jewish roots” in order to “cover up the anti-human essence”, which he called “the basis… of the modern Ukrainian state”, he said.

“And this makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in the sense that an ethnic Jew covers up the glorification of Nazism and covers those who at one time managed the Holocaust in Ukraine,” Putin added.

Zelensky has said that some of his grandfather’s siblings were killed during the Holocaust, and has repeatedly denied accusations of supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

A high-ranking Ukrainian adviser calls Putin’s comments “cynical.”

A senior Ukrainian official has called Vladimir Putin’s comments about Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s Jewish heritage a “cynical attempt” to use the Holocaust to justify Russia’s invasion.

In response to the Russian president’s remarks, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podoliak said they showed that Putin lives “in his own world, an artificial bubble isolated from reality.”

“Putin is not a rational actor worth investing in long-term partnerships: that should be clear to players in all parts of the world,” he said.