Taking into account the unacceptable anti-Semitic statements of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the communication of the Russian Embassy on social networks, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia has today called Vanin to provide explanations and protest.
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It has already been reported that the Israeli Foreign Ministry has summoned the Russian ambassador for clarification after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov equated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Hitler in a televised interview.
Lavrov defended the declared goal of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war to “denationalize” Ukraine, and said that Zelensky’s Jewish origins did not weaken Putin’s position.
The Russian minister said Zelensky may indeed be a Jew, but “Adolf Hitler also had Jewish blood.”
“It means absolutely nothing. Wise Jews say the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews,” Lavrov told Italian television channel Rete4 on Sunday night, causing outrage in Israel.
“Foreign Minister Lavrov’s remarks are unforgivable and horrific statements, as well as terrible mistakes in history,” Israeli Foreign Minister Jair Lapid said in a statement on Monday.
“Jews did not kill themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of anti-Semitism,” he added.
“My grandfather was not killed by Jews, but by the Nazis,” the minister said, advising Lavrov to “open a history book.”
“The Ukrainians are not Nazis, only the Nazis are Nazis, only they carried out the systematic extermination of the Jews,” Lapid said.
Danny Dayan Lavrov, head of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial, described Lavrov’s remarks as “absurd, misleading, dangerous and despicable.”
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