Russian President Vladimir Putin chairing a videoconference meeting of permanent members of Russia’s Security Council. Photo: Reuters/TASS

The US State Department on Friday excoriated Russian President Vladimir Putin over his invocation of the Nazi era as justification for his aggression against Ukraine.

“For Putin to invoke the lie of the denazification of Ukraine, a country with a Jewish president, is baseless and cruelly deranged,” the office of the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism declared on Twitter.

The Russian strongman has continually depicted Ukrainian leaders, including the country’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as Nazi sympathizers as part of the shrill propaganda campaign that has accompanied the Russian invasion launched this week.

Earlier on Friday, in an appeal to Ukrainian military officers to launch a coup against their country’s elected leadership, Putin stated: “It seems like it will be easier for us to agree with you than this gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.”

Putin said he was appealing to the Ukrainian military to not “allow neo-Nazis and Banderites to use your children, your wives and the elderly as human shields. Take power into your own hands.”

“Banderites” is a reference to the followers of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader whose paramilitary organization fought alongside Nazi Germany during World War II.

The same theme of ridding Ukraine from “Nazism” was emphasized by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, during an interview in which he insisted that Russia did not intend to occupy Ukraine.

“No one is going to occupy Ukraine. The aim of the operation has been openly declared: demilitarizing and denazifying,” Lavrov said on Friday.

Zelensky himself responded angrily to the latest Russian propaganda campaign, pointing to his grandfather’s service in the Soviet Army during World War II.

“How can I be a Nazi?” asked Zelensky in a televised address on Thursday. “Explain it to my grandfather, who went through the entire war in the infantry of the Soviet army, and died a colonel in an independent Ukraine.”

Some observers noted that Zelensky did not make explicit reference to his Jewish origins in the speech. In the past, the Ukrainian leader has spoken of his grandfather’s three brothers who perished during the Nazi Holocaust.

During a videoconference with EU leaders on Thursday night, Zelensky warned them “this might be the last time you see me alive,” the Axios news outlet reported, citing two officials who were present at the meeting.

On Friday, after several Russian news outlets reported that Zelensky had fled Kyiv, the Ukrainian president posted a video on Twitter that showed him standing defiantly alongside fellow politicians on Bankova Street in the heart of the capital. “Zelensky refuted the misinformation of Russian propagandists about his alleged escape from the city,” the accompanying tweet read.

Labeling his adversaries as “neo-Nazis” has not shielded Putin from receiving the same treatment in return. On Thursday night, Russian opponents of the war sprayed the words “Adolf Putin” on several buildings in Moscow as police arrested more than 1,700 people for participating in so-called “unauthorized” public rallies. At several rallies protesting the Russian invasion around the world, participants held posters showing Putin wearing an Adolf Hitler-style haircut and mustache.