Why Vladimir Putin Will Keep Playing Jewish Card in Ukraine Crisis

The Kremlin has issued more condemnations of anti-Semitism in the past week than in the preceding decade. The danger of anti-Semitism was on the lips of the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and President Vladimir Putin himself.

Not Russian anti-Semitism, of course. It was Ukrainian “Neo-Nazism, fascism and anti-Semitism” that raised the Kremlin’s indignation. President Putin even cited the destruction of Orthodox churches and synagogues as a reason for the continued presence of Russian troops in Crimea. (There has been no such destruction.)

On Russian television, the language has been crude: The leaders of the new regime are all simply Nazis. The West either ignores this fact out of blindness and naivite, or has knowingly allied itself with Nazis in a campaign to weaken Russia. (This line of propaganda is taken straight out of an old Cold War playbook.) In a television interview, writer and journalist Alexander Prokhanov warned darkly: “I’m especially astonished by the Jewish organizations that support this Maidan. Don’t they understand that they are helping bring on a second Holocaust?”

A Kremlin-backed organization named “World without Nazism”, headed by Russian-Jewish mini-oligarch Boris Shpigel, has been a vocal participant in this campaign. In early February, its heads met with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in a show of support for his embattled presidency. Shpigel, a former member of the Russian parliament, urged Yanukovych to stand tall against the forces of “extremism and neo-Nazism” that were demonstrating on the streets of Kiev. “World Without Nazism’s” website is full of articles about the specter of Ukrainian neo-Nazism. It has no content on neo-Nazism in Russia.

The Chabad-run Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia has voiced a more sophisticated version of “World Without Nazism’s” position....