Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov likened the Israel-Hamas war to the Russian "denazification" of Ukraine, in an interview he gave to Russian TV on Friday.
Interviewer Dmitry Kiselev asked Lavrov about conspiracy theories relating to the war, including ideas that October 7 was a false flag operation and that the war is a cover for the construction of a parallel Suez Canal from Eilat across the Negev.
Lavrov neither confirmed nor denied any of these theories and linked them to other "unresolved" conspiracies such as a fake moon landing and 9/11.
Lavrov then pivoted and said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's announcements that Hamas must be destroyed and that extremism needed to be eliminated sounded like demilitarization and denazification, Russia's stated war goals in Ukraine.
He claimed that Netanyahu has not criticized Russia's actions in Ukraine and praised him for helping Russia evacuate its citizens from Gaza.
Shared heritage of Russians and Israelis
Lavrov then focused on the shared anti-Nazism of Jews and Russians saying, "We should be very careful about our shared history with Israel, particularly our history of fighting Nazism. This is the main element that unifies us in terms of history. It is a fundamental element of our genetic code, so to speak."
"The Holocaust and the extermination of the multinational Soviet people are comparable," he stated, "But the numbers are different: six million people killed during the Holocaust and over 20 million Soviet people were killed during World War II."
The Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine's response to Ukraine's glorification of Stepan Bandera was "truly alarming," he added.