Russian President Vladimir Putin called on Jews who flee Western Europe due to anti-Semitic violence to move to Russia, i24 News reported Thursday, January 21.

“Let them come to us. In the Soviet Union they used to go away, now let them come back,” Putin said during a meeting with European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor and delegates from seven European Union member states, in which Kantor warned that Western Europe faces a “very real prospect of an exodus of Jews.”

“While Jews were once again a prominent target for global terror during 2015, the attacks in Paris, the U.S., and elsewhere, and the mass murder of Russians on an airline in the Sinai, show that the terrorists target us all,” Kantor said during the meeting, which was also attended by EJC delegates from France, Britain, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and Latvia.

"The situation of the Jews in Europe is the worst it has been since the end of the Second World War," Kantor told Putin.

"Jews are again living in fear and there is a very real prospect of an exodus of Jews from certain parts of Europe.

"There are more Jews who are escaping from France, which is thought to be very safe, than from the war in Ukraine," he added, according to i24 News.

“We commend the Russian authorities in the fight against those who target Jews,” he said.