Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova alongside Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Photo: Reuters/Shamil Zhumatov

The Russian Foreign Ministry’s chief spokesperson launched a bitter verbal attack against Israel on Tuesday, invoking the Holocaust in a protest against Israel’s decision to supply Ukraine with equipment to assist against a potential nuclear accident.

“If only the ancestors of the current Israeli elites knew that their direct descendants were sponsoring a regime that glorifies their murderers and the ideology of the Holocaust,” Maria Zakharova — the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson — declared in a post on the Telegram social media channel.

Zakharova’s ire was reportedly triggered by Israel Atomic Energy Commission Director General Moshe Edri’s statement to the recent General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog. In his speech, Edri noted that “Israel had this year donated equipment to Ukraine as part of Israel’s commitment to treaties to prevent nuclear accidents.” Heavy fighting around Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the largest in Europe, has bolstered concern at the IAEA over the prospect of a devastating nuclear accident.

The propaganda offensive that has accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has consistently depicted Ukraine as a state run by neo-Nazis, despite the fact that its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is openly Jewish. Russia’s campaign exploits the devastating occupation of Ukraine by Nazi Germany during World War II, when up to 1.6 million Jews were murdered, the majority shot during mass executions that have since been described as the “Holocaust by bullets.”

According to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, the “murder of Ukraine’s Jews was mostly carried out by the Einsatzgruppen (the special mobile units that shot Jews) and SD (Nazi intelligence service). They were helped by Ukrainian auxiliaries who gathered the Jews, guarded them, and in many instances participated in their killing. Those who sheltered Jews were in mortal danger from the Germans, as well as from some of their neighbors. Despite the danger, there were individuals and sometimes entire villages who offered Jews shelter.”

Zakharova has a long record of provocative statements about Israel and Jews. In 2016,  she stated on a TV chat show that to understand why former US President Donald Trump won the election that year, “you have to talk to the Jews, naturally.” Adopting a faux Brooklyn accent, she added: “They told me: ‘Marochka [a Russian diminutive for Maria], you understand, of course, we’ll donate to [Democratic Party candidate Hillary] Clinton. But we’ll donate twice as much to the Republicans.’ That was it! The matter was settled, for me personally.”

In March, Zakharova took aim at the Israeli authorities following an incident at the Church of Gethsemane in eastern Jerusalem that was perpetrated by an Israeli extremist, stressing Moscow’s “profound concern” about the status of Christians in Jerusalem. Without citing any specific cases, she claimed that “the number of anti-Christian incidents has grown at an alarming pace recently, as churches, cemeteries of various Christian denominations, clergy, and monks, have become targets for these attacks.”

Zakharova’s boss, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, has also clashed with both Israel and Jewish organizations over similar statements, falsely claiming in a May 2022 interview about Zelensky, “How can there be Nazism in Ukraine if he is a Jew? I may be mistaken but Adolf Hitler had Jewish blood, too. This means absolutely nothing. The wise Jewish people say that the most ardent antisemites are usually Jews.”

Lavrov has also tried to use Israel’s control of territories seized during the Six Day War of 1967 as justification for Russia’s occupation and annexation of Ukrainian territories.

Speaking at the UN General Assembly in New York over the weekend, Lavrov refashioned a statement from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in which the top US diplomat argued that as long as the Russian-backed Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad remained in power, together with the threat posed by his Iranian and Hezbollah allies, Israel was justified in retaining control of the Golan Heights. Lavrov repeated Blinken’s exact statement, but substituted mention of the Golan with the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, which the Russian regime formally annexed in Sept. 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, once seen by many Jewish and Israeli leaders as an ally, has also made hostile statements, most recently in a television address this month in which he depicted Zelensky as a naive patsy carrying out the orders of Western nations.

“The Western masters put a person at the head of modern Ukraine an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins” to cover up “the anti-human essence that is the foundation … of the modern Ukrainian state” and “the glorification of Nazism,” an angry Putin said.