Did Zelenskyi’s father really fight in World War II, as Putin claimed?

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Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a two-hour interview to Tucker Carlson, in which he made many highly questionable statements about the history of Ukraine and the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Among them was the fact that the father of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a soldier on the front lines against the fascists – this certainly refers to the Second World War. However, Zelensky’s father was born after the outbreak of World War II.

“His father fought against the fascists and the Nazis in the Second World War. I talked to him about it once. I said: Volodymyr, what are you doing? Why do you support neo-Nazis today in Ukraine, when your father fought against fascism, he was a front-line soldier?” said the Russian president.

However, Oleksandr Zelenskyi was born on December 23, 1947, after the Second World War, he is a scientist, he graduated with honors in 1972 from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Krivyi Rih Mining and Ore Institute. Since 1995, he was the head of the Department of Informatics and Information Technology at the Krivyi Rih Institute of Economics of the Krivyi Rih National University. He was never a soldier on the front line.

Putin may have been referring to Zelensky’s grandfather, Semyon Ivanovich Zelensky, who was born in 1924 and fought in the Red Army of the Soviet Union during World War II. He really protected Ukraine from the Nazis, as Zelensky himself emphasized.

“Thank you that the inhumane ideology of Nazism is a thing of the past forever. Thanks to those who fought against Nazism – and won,” he said.

Zelenskyi’s great-grandfather and grandfather, as well as his grandfather’s three brothers, all fought in the Soviet army, but his grandfather was the only one who returned home. After the war, Semyon served in the Krivoy Rog police force.

By the way, Putin often uses the propaganda of “de-Nazification” as a reason for invading Ukraine, even though Zelensky himself is Jewish and many of his relatives were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.