Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, said that the US had assembled a coalition of European countries to solve “the Russian question” in the same way that Adolf Hitler had sought a “final solution” to eradicate Europe’s Jews. Now, European Jewish Congress members demand apologies from him.
Lavrov pointed that Washington was using the same tactic as Napoleon and the Nazis in trying to subjugate Europe in order to destroy Russia. Using Ukraine as a proxy, he said, “they are waging war against our country with the same task: the ‘final solution’ of the Russian question.”
“Just as Hitler wanted a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question, now, if you read Western politicians […] they clearly say Russia must suffer a strategic defeat.”
Members of the European Jewish Congress expressed concern following Lavrov’s remarks. The organization released a statement condemning the comments and demanded apologies.
“We are shocked and appalled by this shameful comparison drawn by Minister Lavrov between the actions of a coalition of democratic countries and Hitler’s persecution and murder of six million Jews in the Shoah,” Dr. Ariel Muzicant, the President of the European Jewish Congress claimed.
The White House called Lavrov’s statement “truly offensive.”
“It’s almost so absurd that it’s not worth responding to, other than the truly offensive manner in which he tried to cast us in terms of Hitler and the Holocaust,” White House spokesman, John Kirby, told reporters.
The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, criticized Lavrov, considering the latter’s statement “completely inappropriate, disrespectful and trampling on the memory of six million Jews and other victims who were systematically destroyed during the Holocaust.”
Borrell believes that “there are no parallels between the crimes of Nazi Germany and international assistance to Ukraine in protecting its territory and people from unjustified aggression.”
“Russia is a big country, it is used to fighting to the end, it is used to almost losing, and then restoring everything. It did it to Napoleon, it did it to Hitler. It would be absurd to think that Russia has lost the war or that its military is incompetent,” Borrell said.
The diplomat called for arming Ukraine so that the current fighting for Ukraine would be “not only defensive, but also such that it would take the initiative into its own hands.” At the same time, he denied that the EU is a party to the conflict. According to him, the union does not want to become such.
Borrell also specified that the EU and the participating countries have provided Ukraine with a total of €10 billion in military aid. Earlier, the Pentagon estimated Washington’s assistance to Kiev at more than €24.2 billion.
Russia’s response
Borrell’s statement was found “hypocritical” by the Russian Foreign Ministry, especially against the background of racist statements by the Head of EU diplomacy, who divided the world into a “blooming garden” inhabited by “a billion EU and US citizens” and the “jungle” advancing on it, as well as the EU’s open support for the Kiev neo-Nazi regime.
The Foreign Ministry noted that since 2014, the armed forces of Ukraine and nationalist battalions have been shelling peaceful cities of Donbass with impunity, killing civilians, including children. At the same time, the EU is training the AFU fighters, preparing to supply even more weapons and military equipment that will continue to be used to destroy civilians.
“The EU claims there are no parallels, but they themselves turn a blind eye to swastikas on the chevrons of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Nazi flags and the very symbols with which the Europeans barbarously invaded our lands more than 80 years ago,” the ministry says.
The Foreign Ministry recalled that “it was our people who stood up more than 80 years ago to protect humanity from the plague of fascism, misanthropy, Nazism, and aggressive imperialist militarism, without dividing it into nationalities.”
“While the Nazis were poisoning Slavs, Jews, Gypsies, and other nations in one gas chamber, our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers fought with the Wehrmacht and freed prisoners of concentration camps. It is their memory that we sacredly honor and will honor for centuries,” the press service of the ministry reminded.
The fact is admitted that at the end of the XX – beginning of the XXI century, Russians were faced with the desire to discredit the role of their country in the fight against Nazism and neo-Nazism, with outright Russophobia and calls for the “abolition of Russia”.
“Any attempt to rehabilitate Nazism, racist practices must be resolutely opposed. This is something that should unite peoples, not divide them,” the message says.
The Foreign Ministry recalled that the greatest victims among all participants of the anti-Hitler coalition were suffered by the peoples of the Soviet Union, therefore, ignoring by the so-called “democratic coalition” of the West of the glorification of the Nazis by the modern Ukrainian regime is a distortion of the memory of the Holocaust and the victims of Nazism.
“We would like to ask, where were such structures as the EJC [European Jewish Congress] when monuments to soldiers-liberators were demolished on the territory of Europe; when the Nazis marched through the capitals of European countries under anti-Semitic symbols and with Judophobic slogans; when exactly the Europeans tried to torpedo our resolution at the UN on combating the glorification of Nazism?” the question is being asked in the Russian diplomatic department.
As a conclusion, the message says that it is never too late to admit your mistakes and make the right moral choice.
“Therefore, we call on Europe to raise its voice to fight anti-Semitism, Russophobia, and other manifestations of discriminatory policies against individual nationalities and ethnic groups.”
Ru-Main, 24.01.2023
Sources: Gazeta, The Jerusalem Post, Russian FM
