Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov is allowed to spread crude claims unchallenged on an Italian talk show. He claims, for example, that Adolf Hitler had “Jewish blood”. High Israeli officials are outraged.
By Oliver Meiler, Rome, and
Peter Munch, Tel Aviv
42 minutes, almost without interruptions. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave a long interview to the private Italian television channel Rete 4 on Sunday evening, which was much closer to a monologue than a one-to-one conversation. That is precisely why there is now a great need for discussion. He was invited by “Zona Bianca”, a talk show. Your presenter and interviewer, Giuseppe Brindisi, has not previously come across as an expert on international politics; he originally comes from the lighter genre. Rete 4 is part of Mediaset, Silvio Berlusconi’s television empire. And Berlusconi was for a long time one of Vladimir Putin’s closest confidants in the West – a friend even, the two also spent vacations together. There are photos of it, they look like snapshots from a family album.