Russian President Vladimir Putin has apologized to Israel for his top diplomat’s assertion that Adolf Hitler “had Jewish blood,” the Israeli prime minister’s office said Thursday. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said he had accepted the Russian leader’s apology, which came after Russia’s foreign ministry spent several days this week tearing into Israel for supposedly supporting “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov started the spat earlier this week when, while attempting to justify his country’s supposed crusade to liberate Ukraine from “Nazis” despite its president being Jewish, he suggested Jews could also be antisemitic. The Kremlin, perhaps unsurprisingly, made no mention of the apology in its own readout of the two leaders’ phone conversation.
