The conversation below with Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, took place as part of the Ukraine: Thinking Together conference in Kiev. We will be publishing other contributions from the conference in the coming days. The event started off by talking about claims of anti-Semitism in the new Ukrainian government. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Julia Ioffe: My assumption was that with the Holocaust and with the mass emigration at the end of the Soviet period, that there wouldn’t be many Jews left here.

Geoffrey R. Pyatt: All this stuff about fascists and pogroms is laughable. There has not been a wave of anti-Semitic activities in Ukraine since the change in government. Don’t just believe me, listen to the Ukrainian-Jewish community. … There were rabbis on the Maidan, just like there were imams and orthodox priests of every flavor. It’s laughable that Russia has sought to play this card, and that they’ve actually made some headway with it in some places.

JI: But to what extent is the anti-Semitic stuff that’s happening in the East and the South and the Southeast meant to tarnish the government in Kiev as fascists and anti-Semites, and to what extent is it just a natural byproduct of this Russian nationalism, which also historically has violent anti-Semitism?

GP: I would guess it is more of the former. When the question came up: Were they actually asking people to register à la the Third Reich? I said, it doesn’t matter. … Even if it was fraud, it was a fraud intending to sow fear and create uncertainty. And that has been the dominant element of Russian strategy since February 22—to sow fear. Nobody knows where Putin is going to stop, nobody thought he was going to go so far as to invade and annex Crimea, and ever since then Russia has rejected diplomatic off ramps.