Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Sunday labeled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is allegedly Jewish, a “pure Nazi” and a “traitor to the Jewish people.” Lavrov’s incendiary remarks, published in Krasnaya Zvezda, the official newspaper of the Russian Ministry of Defense, align with Moscow’s ongoing propaganda campaign that has repeatedly sought to justify its brutal war on Ukraine by invoking World War II-era rhetoric. “Zelenskyy has turned 180 degrees from a man who came to power on slogans of peace… and in six months has turned into a pure Nazi and, as Russian President [Vladimir] Putin correctly said, into a traitor to the Jewish people,” Lavrov said in the interview. The accusation follows Putin’s own claims in 2023, when he called Zelensky a “disgrace to Jewish people,” furthering the Kremlin’s attempts to paint Ukraine’s leadership as fascists. Since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow has repeatedly described Ukraine’s government as “neo-Nazi” in an effort to justify its aggression. Putin has framed his war as a campaign to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, despite the country’s democratically elected president being Jewish and having lost family members in the Holocaust. Jewish organizations and world leaders have consistently condemned Russia’s misuse of Holocaust-era terminology, warning that such rhetoric distorts history and trivializes the real horrors of Nazi Germany. Israel, while carefully navigating its relationship with both Kyiv and Moscow, has distanced itself from these comparisons, rejecting both Zelensky’s and the Kremlin’s attempts to equate the war with the Holocaust. A spokesperson for Israel’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Lavrov’s latest remarks. This is not the first time Lavrov has invoked inflammatory and historically inaccurate claims about Jews and Nazism. In 2022, he sparked outrage when he insisted that Zelenskyy’s Jewish heritage did not preclude Nazi inclinations, citing a long-debunked conspiracy theory that Adolf Hitler had Jewish ancestry. “So when they say ‘How can Nazification exist if we’re Jewish?’ In my opinion, Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean absolutely anything,” Lavrov said at the time, further claiming that “the biggest antisemites were Jewish.” Israel swiftly condemned those remarks as “unforgivable,” and the comments sparked a diplomatic crisis between Moscow and Jerusalem. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)