Ambassador slams Johnson for his nazi slurs

From yesterday's Guardian.

Russia’s ambassador to the UK has described Boris Johnson’s comparison of this summer’s World Cup to the Nazi Olympics as “unacceptable and totally irresponsible”.

Speaking at a press conference, Alexander Yakovenko complained that Britain had refused to cooperate with Moscow over the investigation into the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. “We have seen no evidence,” he said.

Yakovenko repeated Vladimir Putin’s claim that Russia had “nothing to do with this incident”. He suggested that the UK had its own stores of the lethal novichok nerve agent used in the attack, which was developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s in secret state laboratories.

The foreign secretary predicted on Thursday that Putin would revel in the World Cup to be hosted by Moscow in the same way that Adolf Hitler did in the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936. He also suggested that the UK might advise England football fans to avoid travelling to the tournament for their own safety.

Yakovenko offered his own riposte. “Nobody has the right to insult the Russian people who defeated nazism and lost more than 25m people by comparing our country to Nazi Germany,” he said. 

“We are not buying this. First we have to see the evidence and see the conclusions,” he added, complaining that the British authorities had refused consular access to the Skripals and had kept the embassy in the dark. He wished the Skripals a speedy recovery.

The ambassador downplayed the possibility of a boycott of this summer’s football tournament, saying that the “world community” had picked Russia as the host. He conceded the event would be “advertising” for Russia and said it would showcase the country’s improving living standards.

The foreign secretary said on Thursday that about a quarter of the number of fans who travelled to watch England in Brazil in 2014 were currently expected to go to Russia. He said 24,000 people had purchased tickets, as opposed to 94,000 at the same point in the run-up to the tournament in Brazil.