Ultra-nationalist Russian party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a senior lawmaker whose rhetoric alarmed the West but appealed to Russians’ aggrievement, died at age 75, according to a statement by the speaker of the lower house of Russia's parliament Wednesday.

State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said Zhirinovsky died after "a serious and prolonged illness." The lawmaker was hospitalized with COVID-19 on Feb. 2; in late March, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Zhirinovsky was "in serious condition."

As the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party for three decades, Zhirinovsky was infamous for making vehement statements that were neither liberal nor democratic and typically delivered with a ferocious glare.

He advocated for Russia to forcefully regain control of Alaska from the United States, suggested that Russia hit former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s residence with a nuclear weapon and said he wanted a DNA test to see if he was related to Donald Trump.

He also claimed he had received a total of eight COVID-19 shots since August 2020.

While Zhirinovsky played the role of a wild man, many saw him as a tamed one submissive to the Kremlin. In parliament, his party routinely voted to support measures put forth by the more stolid United Russia party, which is President Vladimir Putin’s power base.

Zhirinovsky founded the Liberal Democrats in 1991 as the Soviet Union was pulling apart, and the group became the country’s first officially recognized opposition party. Later accounts contend that its formation was a KGB project aimed at diverting legitimate opposition sentiment into ineffectual channels.

In its early years, the party had a significant presence in parliament. It won the single largest share of votes in the 1993 parliamentary election and took 64 seats in the 450-member Duma. Its prominence steadily declined, and after the 2021 election, the party was down to 21 seats.

Though the party’s influence fell, Zhirinovsky remained a vivid figure whose comments were received with enthusiasm or revulsion but rarely indifference.

Zhirinovsky was born in Almaty, the capital of then-Soviet Kazakhstan, as Vladimir Volfovich Eidelstein, and moved to Moscow at age 18 to undertake Turkish studies at Moscow State University.

After military service, he held a variety of posts in state committees and unions. His political activities were little-noticed until the Liberal Democratic Party's founding eight months before the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Zhirinovsky’s father, who abandoned the family in 1949, was a Jew of Polish descent – an inconvenient heritage given the strong antisemitic views of Russian nationalists. Zhirinovsky long denied he had Jewish ancestry but finally acknowledged it in a 2001 book, dismissing the importance of his ethnic background in a characteristically harsh assessment.

"Why should I reject Russian blood, Russian culture, Russian land, and fall in love with the Jewish people only because of that single drop of blood that my father left in my mother’s body?" he wrote.

Brash, confrontational and prone to eyebrow-raising antics, Zhirinovsky was a fixture on the Russian political scene for the past three decades and thrived on controversy.

In condolences from the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin described Zhirinovsky as experienced and energetic, saying he "always, with any audience, in the most heated discussions, defended the patriotic position and the interests of Russia."

Often described as a clown in Russian political circles, he was known for his fiery anti-American, anti-liberal and anti-Communist speeches.

He appeared to predict Russia's military action in Ukraine when he addressed parliament in late December.

"This won't be a peaceful year," he said in reference to 2022, urging Russian forces to strike Ukraine.

"This will be a year when Russia will finally become a great country again and everyone will have to shut up."

He even mentioned Feb. 22 – the day President Putin recognized Ukraine's two breakaway regions as independent before he ordered troops into the pro-Western country two days later.

Since Moscow's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent stand-off with the West, Zhirinovsky had shifted into making anti-Kyiv public speeches.

After the annexation, Zhirinovsky arrived in parliament wearing a military uniform and launched into an anti-Ukrainian tirade from the podium.

Zhirinovsky's wrath was also often directed against the United States.

"At night our scientists will slightly change the gravitational field of the Earth, and your country will be under water!" he said in a 2002 video, where he appeared to be visibly drunk.

Zhirinovsky was also known for making anti-Jewish statements, despite acknowledging his father's Jewish heritage.

Bad-boy reputation aside, Zhirinovsky was considered a skillful political operator and carefully toed the Kremlin line.

"Only the Russian leader decides what will happen to the world in the next 10 to 15 years," he said in April 2021.

He will be remembered for his frequent nationalist outbursts and often outrageous behavior, such as throwing a glass of juice at liberal opponent Boris Nemtsov during a televised debate and fighting in parliament's lower house, the Duma.

Supporters described him as a charismatic orator, who was popular with Russians nostalgic for the USSR as well as those disappointed with the Communists, democrats and Putin. Critics found his provocative nationalism shocking.

Russia's liberal opposition despised him for being the Kremlin's token opponent who helped channel discontent.

Members of Zhirinovsky's party were behind some of the country's most attention-grabbing legislative initiatives. One LDPR lawmaker proposed stripping Russian women of citizenship for marrying foreigners. Another proposed banning the U.S. dollar and allowing women to take two days of paid leave a month when they menstruate.

Zhirinovsky himself last year suggested pushing back the age of childhood to 30 because Russians "don't understand a thing until they're 30, they are all children."

In 2007, Andrei Lugovoi, who is wanted in Britain in the murder of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko, was elected to Russia's parliament as a representative of Zhirinovsky's party and still sits in the Duma.

Putin was only an adviser to the mayor of Saint Petersburg when Russians first heard Zhirinovsky's outbursts during the post-Soviet country's first free presidential election in 1991.

The politician promised to lower the prices of vodka and "give each woman a man." He placed third with 6 million votes.

Zhirinovsky famously said he hoped that one day Russian soldiers could "wash their boots in the waters of the Indian Ocean."

Though marginalized in recent years, Zhirinovsky continued to deliver nationalist rants in parliament and regularly appeared on Russian television talk shows.