White House blasts Russia’s Lavrov for Holocaust comparison

The White House blasted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday after he compared the United States’ approach to Russia with the Nazis’ effort to eradicate the Jewish people during the Holocaust.

“Our first reaction is how dare he compare anything to the Holocaust, anything. Let alone a war that they started,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said at a briefing.

“It’s almost so absurd that it’s not worth responding to, other than the truly offensive manner in which he tried to cast us in terms of Hitler and the Holocaust,” he added.

Lavrov accused the U.S. of attempting to form a coalition of European countries to solve the “Russian question” at a news conference on Wednesday, referencing the Nazis’ plan for the genocide of the Jewish people during World War II, known as the “Final Solution.”

“They are waging war against our country with the same task: the ‘final solution’ of the Russian question,” Lavrov said, according to Reuters.

“Just as Hitler wanted a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question, now, if you read Western politicians … they clearly say Russia must suffer a strategic defeat,” he added.

The Kremlin has repeatedly sought to frame its invasion of Ukraine as an effort to “denazify” the country, a move that has sparked intense backlash from the international community. 

Kirby said that Ukraine posed no military threat to Russia before the invasion, and that Western backing of Ukraine’s fight against Russia was the Kremlin’s own doing.

“There would be no need for the United States or Western nations to provide these kinds of weapons and capabilities to Ukraine if Ukraine hadn’t been invaded in an unprovoked way, by Russian military forces,” he said.