Candace Owens Calls Zelensky a 'Very Bad Character' Who's Hurting Ukraine

Conservative commentator Candace Owens criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, stating in a tweet Thursday that he is "a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people."

"I will not move one inch away from that assessment—ever—no matter how flowery the media depictions of him are," Owens added.

Her comment comes days after she backed Russian President Vladimir Putin's claim that Russia created Ukraine, which Putin has used to defend his decision to invade the country.

"Ukraine wasn't a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians...They speak Russian," Owens said on her talk show Tuesday.

Owens comments also come after other conservative figures have criticized Zelensky or Ukraine in recent days.

Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Republican from North Carolina, told supporters at a recent appearance that Zelensky was a "thug."

"Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies," Cawthorn said in a video first published by North Carolina news station WRAL.

Cawthorn faced backlash for his comments after they were made public last week.

On Wednesday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, said that both Russia and Ukraine had violated peace agreements in recent years.

"This is an eight-year-long smoldering conflict in which peace agreements have been routinely violated by both sides," Greene said in a video.

Her comments drew criticism from fellow Republican Liz Cheney, of Wyoming on Thursday.

"Putin is targeting and slaughtering civilians in a brutal unprovoked war against Ukraine, a sovereign democratic nation," Cheney tweeted. "Only the Kremlin and their useful idiots would call that 'a conflict in which peace agreements have been violated by both sides.'"

Owens' tweet Thursday also attracted immediate criticism.

"They're really all-in on this. In retrospect the idea that Putin was blackmailing Trump gave the former guy too much credit," journalist Matthew Yglesias tweeted.

Last week, Owens said that she found the way Russian citizens in the U.S. and abroad are being treated is "appalling."

"That our leaders and government institutions are allowing for—and at times calling for this discrimination following their global 'black lives matter' hysteria is quite telling," Owens tweeted. "Russian lives matter."

Owens' tweet was retweeted by the Russian Embassy in the United States and the Russian Embassy. Despite facing criticism, she said she stood by her tweet.

"For those of you sitting on the edge or [sic] your seats—I stand by every word of my tweet pertaining to the treatment of Russian citizens abroad," she wrote.

"Those calling for russian students, opera singers, etc to be banned are the kind of scum who would have demanded the Japanese internment," she continued.