As chilling as morally serious people find Vladimir Putin, his evident pleasure in humiliating his subordinates, and his wanton cruelty in brutalizing those who defy him (be they domestic opponents or countries that refuse to bend to his will), I must confess that I find Putin’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, even more repulsive. In the six decades that I have been following international affairs – dating back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the good School Sisters of Notre Dame were showing us how to “shelter” under our desks at Baltimore’s Cathedral School – I cannot remember a more blatant or disgusting liar than Mr. Lavrov. Students of history might have thought that the foreign minister of the Third Reich, the former champagne salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop, had retired the gold medal for foreign ministerial mendacity. Mr. Lavrov has proven them wrong – you can indeed be worse than Ribbentrop.

During a March 3 press conference in Moscow, Lavrov continued to defend the Russian “special military operation” (not “war”) in Ukraine as an effort to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” that country, and promised that the “operation” would continue until the “destruction of weapons and infrastructure that threaten” Russia are destroyed. The despicable use of the “Nazi” moniker against a country led by a democratically elected president of Jewish heritage has been a constant theme of Lavrov’s propaganda over the past week and more, and is itself cringe-inducing, no matter how often repeated.

But what kind of man, speaking for what kind of regime, sanitizes the conduct of Russia’s war on Ukraine by speaking of destroying the “infrastructure that threatens us?”

What threat to Russia was posed by the regional governmental headquarters in Kharkiv, deliberately destroyed by Russian forces? How did the Holocaust Memorial at Babyn Yar, struck by a Russian missile, threaten Putin and his regime? How do apartment buildings gutted by Russian bombs and missiles pose a threat to the Kremlin? How does the use of cluster bombs and thermobaric vacuum bombs that cause massive casualties in the hundreds if not thousands enhance Russia’s national security? Are the Ukrainian babies being born in bomb shelters, because hospitals are not safe, a threat to Mr. Lavrov and the regime for which he fronts?

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