Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s claims that Canada is training neo-Nazis are simply “ridiculous and unacceptable,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday.
“What the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs has just said is incredible,” said Mr. Trudeau on the sidelines of a press conference on the automotive sector in Windsor, Ontario.
In an interview granted to an Italian news channel, Minister Lavrov said that Ukraine could still have Nazi elements, even if some personalities, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, are Jewish.
“Hitler was also of Jewish origin, so that doesn’t mean anything,” he said, in Russian and then translated into Italian when asked about Russian claims that he invaded Ukraine to “denazify” the country.
Mr. Lavrov also claimed in the same interview that the United States and Canada trained neo-Nazis who joined the Ukrainian army, according to Russian news agency Tass.
“Americans and especially Canadians have played a leading role in the formation of openly neo-Nazi ultra-radical divisions in Ukraine. The goal has been all these years to get neo-Nazis to join the regular military forces of Ukraine,” he said.
According to Mr. Trudeau, all those who oppose “the horrors of the Holocaust and the extremely worrying rise in hate crimes” must “condemn ever more strongly the ridiculous and unacceptable positions of Russia”.
After question period, Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly said her Russian counterpart should apologize for his own “odious, deplorable and anti-Semitic” rhetoric.
“In his way of approaching the question, what he essentially says is as if he takes the victims of the Holocaust and he turns them into executioners when we know very well what happened during of the Holocaust,” Ms. Joly said. We know that there was a genocide. »
According to her, the Russians are ultimately trying through disinformation to “justify the unjustifiable”.
Minister Lavrov’s remarks on Nazism and anti-Semitism provoked outrage from Israel, which called them “unforgivable”. The country summoned the Russian ambassador to lecture him.
Ukraine also condemned Minister Lavrov’s comments, accusing him of wanting to “rewrite history” and seeking arguments to justify the “mass murders” of Ukrainians.
With the Associated Press