The Israeli prime minister announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a telephone conversation with Jewish Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Thursday, apologized for a statement by his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in which he said that Adolf Hitler was “Jewish blood.”
“The Prime Minister accepted President Putin’s apology for Lavrov’s statement and thanked him for clarifying his position on the Jewish people and the memory of the Holocaust,” the cabinet said in a statement.
Lavrov’s statement caused outrage in the Jewish state.
Contrary to what the Israeli prime minister has said, the Kremlin’s statement about the phone call did not mention any apologies Putin had made to Bennett.
In its statement, the Kremlin only said that the two leaders emphasized the importance of May 9, the day when Moscow marks the anniversary of its victory over Nazism and which will allow this year to “commemorate all” the victims. World War II, “including the victims of the Holocaust”.
Moscow has repeatedly stated that it wants to “disarm” Ukraine and “denazify” it, justifying the February 24 invasion of the neighboring country.
And on Sunday evening, Lavrov told the Italian channel Mediaset in an interview, the text of which was later published by the Russian Foreign Ministry, that Ukrainian President Vladimir “Zelensky answers this argument with the words, how can there be Nazis (in Ukraine) if he himself was a Jew? I could be wrong, but Hitler Jewish blood flowed in his veins.
This statement caused outrage in Israel, which called the Russian ambassador and asked him to give “clarification” on these claims about the existence of Jewish descent from Hitler.
In response to Lavrov’s statement, Bennett condemned the use of the Holocaust in World War II as a “political tool”. “In our time, there is no war that resembles the Holocaust or can be compared to the Holocaust,” he said in a statement released by his office, stressing that “the use of the genocide of Jews as a political tool must be stopped immediately. “
