For more than a month now, Russia, led by President Vladimir Putin, has engaged in horrific acts as it attempts to take over Ukraine. More than 2,571 civilians have been killed, according to the United Nations, including children. Thousands of anti-war protestors have been jailed. Hospitals and other health care facilities have been attacked. Over 2 million Ukrainian have been forced to flee their homes. The city of Mariupol has been devastated. “It’s like a horror movie,” one resident told The Washington Post.

The United States has declared that these unprovoked, unjustified actions constitute war crimes by Russia, and that its leader, Putin, is a war criminal. And to that, he says: I now know what it’s like to walk a mile in Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s shoes.

Yes, on Friday morning, the former KGB agent likened the treatment of Rowling to the treatment of Russia, decrying his country’s alleged cancelation. “They canceled Joan Rowling recently, the children’s author,” Putin said, referring, amazingly, to J.K. Rowling. “Her books are published all over the world…just because she didn’t satisfy the demands of gender rights. They are now trying to cancel our country. I am taking about the progressive discrimination of everything to do with Russia.” He added that cancel culture is akin to Nazi book burning, saying, “We remember the footage when they were burning books. It is impossible to imagine such a thing in our country and we are insured against this thanks to our culture. And it’s inseparable for us from our motherland, from Russia, where there is no place for ethnic intolerance, where for centuries representatives from dozens of ethnic groups have been living together.”

What Putin describes as an attempt to “cancel” Russia is, of course, a global reaction to his unilateral decision to destroy millions of innocent lives. Incidentally, this isn’t the first time he, or a Russian official, or a Republican on Fox News has claimed the country is the victim of cancel culture. But it does appear to be the first time he’s invoked the author of the Harry Potter series to make his case.

As for Rowling, her alleged canceling is about people being offended by her relentless insistence that transgender women are not real women, though we’re not entirely sure one can make the case that someone who retains 13.9 million Twitter followers, whose book sales rose 7% the year she started going after trans people, and whose reported net worth was over $1 billion as of last year, has been “canceled.”

By the way, this isn’t the first time Putin has, incredibly, tried to cast himself as a victim, or suggested that he should be mad at the West. Earlier this month, the Russian Foreign Ministry demanded an audience with the U.S. ambassador, claiming that Biden’s description of the Russian president as a war criminal was “unacceptable,” and that such statements “put Russian–American relations on the verge of a breach.” In response, a spokesman for the State Department said, “It’s awfully rich to hear a country speak about ‘inappropriate comments’ when that same country is engaged in mass slaughter, including strikes and attacks that have resulted in civilian lives [lost], strikes and attacks, barrages that have leveled civilian cities, an invasion of 100,000 plus forces against a largely civilian population.”

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