Russian spokesperson lays into Athens over ‘strange analogies’

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has taken issue over last week’s remarks by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis during his trip to US for drawing, she said, analogies between the freedom fighters of the Greek Revolution 200 years ago “and the crimes committed by the regime in Kyiv against the civilians of the Donbas for eight years.”

According to the Russian news agency TASS, she derided Mitsotakis for offering “a strange choice of historical analogies.”

She added that it was “unbelievable” that the “heroes who defended the fortress of Mesolongi in 1825-26 are compared to Nazis of the Azov order.”

“This is another attempt by Athens to justify its profoundly wrong decision to join the Western anti-Russian front, including supplying Kyiv with weapons used for daily strikes against peaceful civilians in Donbas,” she said.

“Faced with many accusations, Russia is not in a position to offer an alternative vision, as all Russian media outlets have been excluded from the Greek media,” Zakharova said, adding the commentary coming out of Greece is a display of its loyalty to the rules imposed by the US and NATO. 

“Moscow is working on measures against the English-language media in response to the ‘unfriendly actions’ of foreign governments towards the Russian media,” the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said.

Zakharova said Russia was preparing measures against the “Anglo-Saxon media,” using a term used by Russian officials to refer to the English-speaking world.

The Greek government has been outspoken in its criticism of the Russian invasion. 

In his speech to the Joint Session of US Congress last week, Mitsotakis said democracy was being tested by Russia.