Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has sent a proposal to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office requesting permission for an official visit to the Jewish State following the devastating attack by Hamas, Axios reported Wednesday.
“In the face of such a terrorist strike, everyone who values life must stand in solidarity,” Zelensky said shortly after the Hamas surprise invasion on Saturday. “Israel has the full right to defend itself against terror.”
The embattled Ukrainian leader reiterated his support for Israel during an appearance at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday featuring Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. “It was very important not to be alone. Very important,” Zelensky said during the meeting.
“Terrorists like Putin — or like Hamas — seek to hold to free and democratic nations as hostages, and they want power over those who seek freedom,” Zelensky said. “The terrorists will not change. They just must lose — and that means we must win.”
Zelensky’s recent comments mark a notable shift in his rhetoric towards Israel, whom he has been openly critical of for not providing more military aid. Zelensky previously condemned Israel for withholding sophisticated air-defense systems that could have severely hampered Russia’s aerial offensive. “This is the decision of your governments…not to annoy the Kremlin, which was adopted a long time ago,” the Ukrainian leader told Israel’s left-leaning outlet, Haaretz, in October 2022.
“If we had immediately secured our skies when faced with a missile and drone threat, Russia would not even have a motive now to go to Iran and offer it something in exchange for assistance in terror.”
Zelensky’s comments prompted Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz to reassure his Ukrainian counterparts, underscoring the importance of bilateral relations. “Gantz emphasized the operational limitations faced by the State of Israel. As a result, Israel will not provide weapon systems to Ukraine,” the Minister’s office said in a statement at the time.
Zelensky, who is of Jewish heritage, has been accused by Russian president Vladimir Putin of being a Nazi and antisemitic. “The Western masters,” the Russian leader said in late September during a public broadcast, “put a person at the head of modern Ukraine an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins” to obscure “the anti-human essence that is the foundation…of the modern Ukrainian state.”
Putin had made similar comments months after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. “I have a lot of Jewish friends. They say Zelensky is not a Jew; he is a disgrace to the Jewish people,” the Russian leader told an audience attending an economic conference in St. Petersburg in June of last year. Putin’s comments drew the condemnation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, condemning the leader for spreading “antisemitic lies” and “distorting the Holocaust to justify his brutal invasion of Ukraine.”