Vivek Ramaswamy Appears to Call Zelensky a ‘Nazi’ During Presidential Debate
The mainstream news media used to report on the troubling ties Kyiv maintains to leaders like Stepan Bandera and the neo-Nazi Azov regiment, but has stopped
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican hopeful in 2024, touched one of the mainstream media’s third rails during Wednesday’s presidential debate in Miami when he appeared to call Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “Nazi.”
Ramaswamy, who has been critical of U.S. support for Ukraine, said it is madness to look at Kyiv and see a “paragon of democracy.”
“This is a country that has banned 11 opposition parties. It has consolidated all media into one state TV media arm… that’s not democratic,” he said.
He also noted that Zelensky has threatened not to hold elections this year “unless the U.S. forks over more money.”
That is not democratic. It has celebrated a Nazi in its ranks, the comedian in cargo pants, a man called Zelensky… That is not democratic,” he said.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman from his campaign, told The New York Times the candidate was referring to the event in Canada in September when a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian war veteran — who served under Nazi control — received a standing ovation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was ridiculed in the Western media when he announced—at the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—that one of his chief goals was to smash the neo-Nazis in the country who have been waging a Hitleresque assault in Russian-speaking Donbass region that killed over 14,000 residents since the U.S. led 2014 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych.
The mainstream news media used to report on the troubling ties Kyiv maintains to leaders like Stepan Bandera and the neo-Nazi Azov regiment, but has stopped.
Earlier in the war, Putin said that people who lived in the Zaporozhye, Kherson, Lugansk, and Donetsk “have seen and are seeing the atrocities that neo-Nazis conduct in the occupied areas of the Kharkiv region.”
“The heirs of Bandera and Nazi punishers kill people, torture, throw them in prison, settle scores, crackdown, abuse civilians,” he said.
Ukraine’s Azov regiment, formed in May 2014 and was composed of civilian volunteers from neo-Nazi groups who faced off against Russian separatists in places like Donbass. They were known to engage in “xenophobic and neo-Nazi ideals and physically assaulted migrants, the Roma community, and people opposing their views,” Al Jazeera reported.