Just when it seemed the Kremlin’s manipulative and belligerent rhetoric had reached its peak, it plunged to a new level. In a repeated attempt to denigrate Ukraine and its president as a “Nazi.” Russia’s Foreign Minister (see here), Sergei Lavrov, claimed that Hitler “also had Jewish blood” and that “the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews.”
Such claims, intended to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine, are not only factually false. They trivialize the Holocaust, incite anti-Semitism, and erode collective historical memory. It is no wonder that Lavrov accepted serious accusations from the Israeli prime minister (here), EU leaders (here) and many others.
Far from being a random linguistic error, Lavrov’s claims are part of a deliberate and repeated effort to revise history for political purposes, such as mobilizing domestic public support for the war. It is also an overture to international extremist movements and fans of (anti-Semitic) conspiracy theories – audiences that the Kremlin has attracted to its disinformation campaigns in the past. (see here)
Previous pro-Kremlin disinformation claims that the world’s “Jewish-Masonic” globalist powers were seeking to foment war between Ukraine and Russia illustrate this trend. In another notable example dating back to 2017, the Russian state-controlled Channel One shared an anti-Semitic cartoon during its most-watched analytical news program “Vremya,” asking viewers: “How did the Rothschild family fight to control the world?” The program’s host also holds the position of head of Russia’s Presidential Council for Human Rights (here).
Now, caught up in its own senseless and brutal war, the Kremlin is further isolating itself from the world not only by its actions but also by its rhetoric. Instead of retracting Lavrov’s statements, Russia’s Foreign Ministry doubled down on its anti-Semitic rhetoric and accused Israel of supporting “neo-Nazis in Kiev.”
From radioactive ash to radioactive desert
In another blatant example of warmongering and disinformation this week, EU-sanctioned Russian TV host Dmitry Kiselyov attacked the United Kingdom, accusing it of pushing Ukraine to continue fighting against Russia while threatening the UK with nuclear annihilation.
First, Kiselyov falsely claimed that the UK Prime Minister made nuclear threats against Russia, an accusation disputed by the independent Russian newspaper Insider (hereHe then went on to threaten the United Kingdom with various scenarios of nuclear annihilation, claiming that a Russian nuclear missile would be enough to “drown the British Isles once and for all” and that a Russian torpedo could cause a nuclear tsunami that would turn “everything left of the British Isles into a radioactive wasteland.”
While the UK continues to support Ukraine, it has become a prominent target of the Kremlin's ire (see previous attacks on Russians defecting to the UK and previous disinformation claims claiming for example that the UK along with the US were largely responsible for the escalation around Ukraine and that the UK was falsely implicating Russia in the Bucha massacre).
(Full article published by EU vs Disinfo, available in English)