The United States accused Russia on Monday of exploiting antisemitism and the suffering of Holocaust survivors by labeling its war against Ukraine as a "denazification" operation.
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The dossier was published on the US State Department website under the "Disarming Disinformation" section dedicated to revealing Russian disinformation about its invasion of Ukraine. The publication appeared ahead of the UN Security Council session scheduled to be held on Monday and initiated by Moscow to support its denazification claim.
"To serve its predatory ends, the Kremlin is exploiting the suffering and sacrifice of all those who lived through World War II and survived the Holocaust," the dossier said. "In the process, the Kremlin is detracting from critically important global efforts to combat antisemitism and is instead propagating one of antisemitism's most insidious forms, Holocaust distortion."
It also quotes historians and Holocaust remembrance organizations, including Israel's Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
"The Kremlin falsely claims the worst Nazis were actually Jews, and seeks to downplay the role of antisemitism in Nazi ideology," the dossier says, referring to Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's statement made earlier in May, suggesting that "the worst antisemites are Jews themselves" and that "Hitler also had Jewish blood."
The document emphasizes that Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky lost his family during the Holocaust and cites Israeli officials who condemned Lavrov's remarks. Russia's President Vladimir Putin later apologized for his minister's comments.
Meanwhile, the lower house of the Russian parliament will gather on July 15 for an extraordinary session, its council decided on Monday, just days after Putin warned that he had not even started to get serious about the war in Ukraine.
The Russian president used a meeting with parliamentary leaders on Thursday to dare the United States and its allies to try to defeat Russia in Ukraine. Parliamentary leaders all thanked Putin for his decisions.
The parliament, dominated by a party that always supports Putin, listed some amendments on competition and information policy that would be discussed at the extraordinary session.
Vladimir Vasilyev, the head of the United Russia party, which has 325 seats in the 450-seat parliament, said that lawmakers would discuss more than 60 issues at the session.
"It is necessary that the processes going on now receive a legal response," he said on the pro-Putin party's Telegram channel. "So the council discussed the agenda for the 15th: we plan to consider a little more than 60 issues."
Vasilyev did not disclose what the issues were. The Communist Party said more than 80 draft laws would be discussed.
At the meeting with Putin on Thursday, Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin told Putin that the Russian parliament would help two Russian-backed self-declared breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine to develop their legal system.
In related news, Latvia's Defense Ministry announced on Monday it was reinstating compulsory military service following the invasion of Ukraine.
The ministry said that the war in the neighboring country changed Latvia's defense considerations, according to The New York Times.
The "security implications of the Russia-Ukraine war have led to numerous new challenges," Artis Pabriks, Latvia's defense minister, said in a statement. "To overcome them, we need to boost our combat capabilities," he added.
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Latvia has a population of about two million people. Military conscription of men ages 18 to 27, which was scrapped in 2007, is to be phased in over five years.
The notion came shortly after Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO, abandoning decades of neutrality. Latvia, along with Estonia and Lithuania, which already had mandatory military conscription, is a member of both NATO and the European Union. Since Moscow's invasion of Ukraine in late February, all three Baltic nations urged NATO to increase its deployments in the region.
Earlier in June, Estonia accused Moscow of violating its airspace. The Russian army also conducted military drills simulating missile strikes on Estonia.
Prior to that, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised Lithuania it would defend "every centimeter of NATO territory." Berlin also committed to expanding the multinational German-led NATO combat unit in Lithuania to the size of a brigade.
i24NEWS contributed to this report.
