Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, has issued a statement on the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Yad Vashem deplores the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which will inevitably lead to dire consequences.
We fear in particular for the wellbeing of innocent civilians and deplore any deliberate endangerment of their safety.
Moreover, the propagandist discourse accompanying the current hostilities is saturated with irresponsible statements and completely inaccurate comparisons with Nazi ideology and actions before and during the Holocaust. Yad Vashem condemns this trivialization and distortion of the historical facts of the Holocaust.
Russia has on numerous occasions referred to members of the Ukrainian leadership as Nazis or neo-Nazis, and has called for the "deNazification" of Ukraine, alleging this to be one of its prime motivations for waging war against its neighbor.
For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is Jewish, has protested the terms used by members of the Russian government, referring to his grandfather's Second World War military service in the Red Army in order to bolster his anti-fascist credentials.