Take the most visually spectacular incident: the daubing of a swastika and anti-Semitic slogans on a synagogue in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea. The incident occurred the night before the Russians invaded, creating convenient photographic confirmation of one of Moscow’s pretexts for invasion: the supposed neo-Nazi menace inside Ukraine. The synagogue’s security camera recorded that a lone individual, never subsequently identified, was responsible for the graffiti. There had been no previous such incident in the nearly two decades since the local Jewish community recovered the synagogue from communist-era confiscation.

The circumstances surrounding the two violent anti-Semitic incidents are even murkier. The victim of one is a well-known and respected figure in Kiev’s Jewish life, who wears his hair and dresses in a visibly Jewish way. He was attacked suddenly from behind at night and stabbed in the leg, never managing to identify who assaulted him. The second incident involved a couple bursting into a local synagogue one night and claiming that they had been surrounded by a gang and physically threatened, but had hailed a taxi and escaped just in time.

In early March, leaders of Ukraine’s Jewish community—which today, according to most estimates, numbers in the low hundreds of thousands—published an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin in which they declared their support for a “sovereign, democratic, and united Ukraine.” “Your certainty about the growth of anti-Semitism in Ukraine … does not correspond to the actual facts,” they wrote.

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There’s no denying that the relationship between Ukrainians and Jews has historically been a difficult one. Jews came in large numbers to Ukrainian territory in the 1500s, when the country was carved into estates by the Polish crown. Aristocratic landlords recruited literate and numerate Jews to manage these new estates—to oversee the production of grain and ship it down the Vistula river to feed Western Europe. For the enserfed Ukrainian peasant, the Polish king and his nobles were remote figures. It was a Jewish middleman who typically supervised the peasant’s labor, collected rents, and enforced the estate’s monopoly on the distilling and sale of vodka. To the peasant, that middleman became the face of foreign exploitation. The hatred this engendered was reinforced by the teachings of an Orthodox church that vilified Jews as killers of Christ who still feasted on bread soaked in Christian blood. These attitudes persist, alas, to this day. One rabbi I met in Ukraine told me that an Orthodox priest had refused an invitation to an interfaith tea-and-cake meeting at his synagogue with the explanation, “I don’t eat blood.”

One of the worst massacres of European Jews between the Crusades and World War II took place in Ukraine in the 1640s and 1650s. Half Ukraine’s Jews lost their lives, and the devastated community would not begin to recover until the 19th century. Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the warlord who unleashed that massacre, appears on horseback in a statue that dominates the square in front of Kiev’s cathedral. It was erected more than a century ago by tsarist authorities who appreciated his role as the leader who delivered Ukraine to Russia. It’s more than a little disconcerting, however, that his face still decorates the five-hryvnia note of independent Ukraine.