Kyiv/Moscow, May 06, 2022 | According to Israeli sources, Russian President Vladimir Putin has apologized to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for the statements made by his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He had claimed that Adolf Hitler could have had “Jewish blood”. “The Prime Minister accepted President Putin’s apologies for Lavrov’s remarks and thanked him for clarifying his attitude towards the Jewish people and the memory of the Holocaust,” Bennet’s office said in a statement Thursday.
International outrage after a television interview
An interview with Lavrov was broadcast on the Italian broadcaster Mediaset last weekend. In it, the Russian foreign minister claimed that the biggest anti-Semites had always been Jews. And he literally said: “I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood.”
The statements sparked international outrage. Israel’s Foreign Minister Jair Lapid spoke of a “terrible historical mistake” and quoted the Russian ambassador as saying. Moscow then followed up again. On Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused Israel of supporting “the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv” – President Volodymyr Zelenskyj is himself Jewish. After the sharp international criticism of Lavrov’s statements, Putin and Bennett called each other on Thursday.
(apa / pma)
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