10 June 2021, Thursday, 14:55 180

Putin Sees Zelenskyy's Indigenous Peoples Bill As Reminiscent Of Nazi Practices

Редактор: Daria Zubkova

Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's bill on the indigenous peoples of Ukraine resembles Nazi practices.

He said this in an interview with the Russia 24 TV channel, Ukrainian News Agency reports.

"In itself, the division into indigenous, first-class and second-class categories of people - this already completely resembles the theory and practice of Nazi Germany. But what about people with mixed blood? Zelenskyy himself is a Jew by nationality. I don't know, he may have mixed blood there. What to do with these people? They will, like in Nazi Germany, measure their skulls and other parts of the body with a compass and determine how they defined a real and a fake Aryan, and here they will define a real and a fake Ukrainian?" he said.

Putin called the bill "ugly."

"Of course, negatively. How else can you relate to this? To speak of Russians as a non-indigenous people is not just incorrect, it is ridiculous and stupid, it does not correspond to history absolutely. Nobody wants to be second-class people. This will lead to that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, will be forced to either leave or start rewriting themselves in some other way," he said.

According to the Russian President, this legislative initiative is "a powerful and very serious blow to the Russian people as a whole."

“It cannot be indifferent to us,” he said.

As Ukrainian News Agency reported, earlier the State Duma of the Russian Federation asked the parliamentary assemblies of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE PA) and the Council of Europe (PACE) to condemn Zelenskyy's bill on indigenous peoples as discriminatory.

Zelenskyy proposes the Verkhovna Rada define the concept of "indigenous people" and to legislate that such in Ukraine are Crimean Tatars, Karaites and Krymchaks.