Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stood by his country's claim that it invaded Ukraine in part to root out Nazism, dismissing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Judaism as irrelevant and suggesting that Adolf Hitler “had Jewish blood.” The remarks came during the week that Israel commemorates the Holocaust
, the head of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, Dani Dayan, condemned Lavrov’s remarks as"false, delusional and dangerous, and worthy of all condemnation."Putin's attempt to justify his invasion as a"denazification" effort plays on the Russian public's longstanding hatred for the Nazi regime, but Zelenskyy is Jewish and had family members perish in the Holocaust. Russian officials have compared him to Jews who were forced to collaborate with Nazis.
"Russian troops manage to be even more cynical than the Nazis 80 years ago," he said."At that time, the invaders did not say that it was the Mariupol residents and the defenders of the city who shelled and killed themselves." The Ukrainian president predicted that U.S. aid in the form of the Lend-Lease program"will help Ukraine and the whole free world beat the ideological successors of the Nazis, who started a war against us on our land."Tyler O'Neil is an editor at Fox News.