Sergei Lavrov has headed Russian diplomacy since 2004 after ten years representing his country at the United Nations. This longevity, exceptional in modern diplomacy, is a testament to the unshakable trust that Vladimir Putin has in his foreign minister. It also endows Lavrov with a very rich experience in international relations at the highest level, to the point that he has been dubbed the “Talleyrand of Russian diplomacy.”
The shock was all the greater when this experienced diplomat from now on called Hitler and the Nazis to better disqualify the opponents of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Fine connoisseurs of the Moscow mysteries attribute this verbal radicalization to the sanctions imposed since March 2022 on Lavrov’s daughter-in-law, who lived in an upscale London area, where she had been a leader until then. However, the reasons for such a rhetorical escalation matter less than the seriousness of the anti-Semitic stereotypes so recycled by the head of Russian diplomacy.
Lavrov has repeatedly hammered on the international scene that the “military special operation” – Russia’s official term for its invasion of Ukraine – aims to “denazify” that country and save the Russian-speaking population there from “genocide”. He only repeated the provocative formulas of President Vladimir Putin himself during the outbreak of the Russian offensive.
“Hitler also had Jewish blood”
But he went even further when, in May 2022, Italian television asked him about the Ukrainian President’s Jewish origins: “And if Zelenskyy is a Jew? This does not change the presence of Nazi elements in Ukraine. It seems to me that Hitler also had Jewish blood. And to add: “Some of the worst anti-Semites are Jews.” The head of Russian diplomacy is thus taking up a conspiracy tale that has become fashionable in negationist circles and which, as usual, continues to be spread despite categorical denials by historical researchers.
Such anger is sparking an outcry in Israel, where Holocaust Memorial director Dani Dayan has called it “delusional and dangerous.” The head of Israeli diplomacy, Yaïr Lapid, denounced “scandalous, unforgivable statements and a terrible historical mistake” and added that the Russian ambassador to Israel was summoned for “clarification”.
Far from changing, Sergey Lavrov insists, signing a press release from his ministry: “We paid attention to Minister Lapid’s anti-historical statements, which largely explain his government’s decision to support the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv. Unfortunately, history knows examples of cooperation between Nazis and Jews. With the claim that “Ukraine is not alone in this case,” Russian foreign policy has accused Latvian President Egils Levits of Nazi sympathies despite his Jewish origins.
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