“Today they are trying to cancel a thousand-year-old country; I am talking about progressive discrimination against everything related to Russia,” Putin alleged in televised remarks, in which he mentioned Russian music and literature.

Putin compared the current “cancel culture” to the Nazis’ book burnings in the 1930s and also mentioned another, more recent example: that of JK Rowling.

He assured that the British author was canceled because it did not satisfy the demands of gender rights.

Rowling faced a flurry of criticism in 2020 for her views on issues related to transgender people.

She then stated that she was concerned about a “new trans activism” that she felt was “pressing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.”

The author responded to Putin on Friday by sharing an article on social networks about Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician sentenced this week to 9 years in prison in Russia.

“Possibly the best critics of Western cancel culture are not those currently killing civilians for the ‘crime of resisting,’ or imprisoning and poisoning their critics.”

She accompanied his tweet with the hashtag # IStandWithUkraine (“I stand with Ukraine”).

Rowling also announced that she will match up to 1 million pounds out of her own pocket (about $1.3 million) in donations to a charity she co-founded to help children in Ukraine.