How Moscow Tries to ‘Put Netanyahu in His Place’ Over Iran and Holocaust Memory |
Russia’s latest attack on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not really about historical sensitivity. It is about power, hierarchy, and the Kremlin’s growing need to shield Iran while pretending to lecture Israel on memory, morality, and World War II.
On April 21, 2026, Maria Zakharova, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Information and Press Department and its official spokeswoman, opened a new phase in Moscow’s verbal assault on Israel by accusing Netanyahu of showing “disrespect” toward the victims of the Holocaust, World War II, and what Russia calls the “genocide of the Soviet people.” She was reacting to Netanyahu’s speech at Israel’s state memorial ceremony, where he warned that the Iranian regime had planned another Holocaust and said that, under different circumstances, the names Isfahan, Fordow, and Natanz could have become for the Jewish people what Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka already are: symbols of annihilation.
Moscow did not answer the substance of that warning. It did not seriously engage the threat posed by Tehran, the regime’s record, or Israel’s right to view Iranian nuclear and missile ambitions as existential. Moscow shifts the discussion into its favorite propagandistic register: moral lecturing, conceptual distortion, manipulation of World War II memory, and the almost automatic insertion of Ukraine into disputes that are actually about the threat Iran poses to Israel.
Not a personal outburst, but a Kremlin signal
That is what made Maria Zakharova’s intervention so telling. Zakharova is not an eccentric commentator freelancing on social media. She is one of the most visible public voices of Russian foreign policy, the official spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, and a loyal messenger of the system. Formally, she operates within the Foreign Ministry hierarchy. In practice, she often articulates and defends the broader Kremlin line on foreign policy, the war........