President Zelenskyy is from a Ukrainian Jewish family. At the start of the war Russia claimed Ukraine was taken over by Nazis and they were trying to liberate the country. It was a ridiculous claim and they had to come up with other justifications afterwards
Is it fair to characterise the Ukrainian leadership as Jewish because the President is Jewish?
With the same logic you could say that the USA was under "black leadership" when Obama was president. Whether that is technically true depends on what you mean by "black leadership" and what your expect to entail from it. However, under the leadership of the black president and various black members of House and Senate, black people still continued to be ghettoised, red lined, incarcerated disproportionately, and in general be socioeconomically disadvantaged.
With that in mind, is a Jewish president an enough of an influence to declare the whole leadership Jewish? How do you reconcile that with the constant barrage photos of Ukrainian soldiers with SS and Banderite insignias and tattoos?
Well, in context of "the Nazis have taken over and our only option is a military operation to remove the government", I highly doubt the Nazis would allow a Jewish person to be elected as president in the first place. If they don't have that ability then they clearly don't have enough power to justify a foreign invasion
If they were serious about stopping Nazis maybe they should have started with Dmitry Utkin who has Nazi tattoos and literally named the state-funded Wagner group after Hitler's favorite composer.
It's almost like this has never been about stopping Nazis at all
I highly doubt the Nazis would allow a Jewish person to be elected as president in the first place
Why would they not allow that? Literally one Jewish in a seat of power is enough for people like you to turn a blind eye towards entire Nazi batallions. This is after I gave the example of the Obama and how a leader's identity is not necessarily concominant with the direction the state is headed in. Similarly one picture of Utkin with Nazi tattoos is enough to convince you that Wagner in its entirety is Nazi or Nazi aligned or whatever your point is but you won't extend the same courtesy towards Biletsky or the photos of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi symbology.
It ia possible that Putin and Russia are not ideologically opposed to Nazism though with the WW2 it seems unlikely. Normal people don't believe that the Russian invasion is Putin's holy crusade against the Nazi ideology or a Duginist quest to expand the Russian empire. People who don't base their ontology off of Harry Potter understand that war and conflict for materially grounded reasons rather than ideological initiatives. Russia's invasion was provoked by a US backed coup which installed a pro-US leadership at Russia's doorstep and armed nao-Nazi militias that have been waging an ethnic war against the Russian speaking regions of Ukraine that did not accept the legitimacy of the post-coup government. It does not matter if they are Nazis or Death Eaters of whatever. The war is a response to agressive posturing by the west. Discussions of ideological and rhetorical honesty are not relevant.