Miami—Ex-pharmaceutical CEO Vivek Ramaswamy took his campaign’s monthslong opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine to a new level Wednesday evening when he tied Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to Nazism.
“Ukraine is not a paragon of democracy,” Ramswamy said in response to a question about whether he’d support additional aid to Ukraine amid Russia’s invasion. “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. It has threatened not to hold elections this year unless the U.S. forks over more money.”
“Ukraine is not a paragon of democracy,” he continued. “It has celebrated a Nazi in its ranks — a comedian in cargo pants, the man called Zelensky — doing it in their own ranks. That is not democratic.”
Several media outlets and prominent critics of Ramaswamy immediately accused the biotech entrepreneur of calling Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a “Nazi.”
Ramaswamy’s campaign says his “Nazi” reference is being taken out of context. “People keep on saying that and he didn’t,” Ramaswamy spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told National Review in the spin room after the debate. “Read the transcript.”
McLaughlin told the New York Times that his invocation of the word “Nazi” referred to Zelensky’s trip back to Canada back in September, where he joined a standing ovation in the Canadian parliament honoring a Ukrainian-Canadian war hero, Yaroslav Hunka, later identified by Jewish advocacy groups as having served in a Nazi unit in WWII.
“Maybe he misspoke, I don’t know,” ex-presidential candidate and former Congressman Will Hurd (R-T.X.) told National Review Wednesday evening. “I don’t put much stock into anything Vivek Ramaswamy says when it comes to foreign policy because he himself has said he’s only been following this stuff for the last couple of months.”
Russian president Vladimir Putin has repeatedly referred to Zelensky, who is Jewish, as a Nazi and has cast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an effort to eradicate Nazism.