Vladimir Putin was forced into a humiliating apology after his foreign minister claimed Adolf Hitler had Jewish origins, it has been claimed.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Thursday that the Russian leader had apologised for Sergey Lavrov's unsubstantiated comments about the Nazi dictator.
Germany's Third Reich oversaw the murder of six million Jews during the 1930s and 40s, mainly in concentration camps like Auschwitz.
Bennett said he shared a phone call with Putin, in which the despot also claimed he would allow civilian passage from the besieged Azovstal Steelworks in the Ukrainian port of Mariupol.
This would be done via a humanitarian corridor handled by the United Nations and Red Cross.
Bennett's office said Israel's Prime Minister requested civilian passage from the Steelworks after an earlier conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Israel lambasted Lavrov this week for saying Hitler had Jewish roots, describing the remarks as an "unforgivable" falsehood that debased the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.
Lavrov made the comment on Sunday when asked why Russia said it needed to "denazify" Ukraine if Zelensky was himself Jewish.
"When they say 'what sort of nazification is this if we are Jews', well I think that Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it means nothing," Lavrov told Italy's Rete 4 channel, speaking through an Italian interpreter.
After the call with Putin, Bennett said he had accepted the apology and thanked the Russian leader for "clarifying his regard for the Jewish people and the memory of the Holocaust".
Israel, which has sought to keep good ties with Kyiv and Moscow, has acted as an intermediary, although an Israeli official said Bennett had suspended those efforts in late March to deal with a spate of Arab street attacks in Israel.
The latest phone calls with Putin and Zelensky suggested Israel may be resuming mediation efforts.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine has seen him compared multiple times to Hitler.
Mayor of besieged city Mariupol said reports alleging that civilians were being moved to Russian labour camps as "the logic of Nazi Germany".
Vadym Boychenko said such events being repeated in the 21st century were "hard to imagine".
At the time the invasion started, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace compared Putin's tactics to that of Hitler in the lead up to World War Two.
He said: “In Munich in 1938, Adolf Hitler all along had a plan to invade parts of Europe.
"And all the diplomacy was about a straw man attempt by him to buy time.
“Putin has been set on this for many many months and certainly over a year.
"And I think that’s why - it doesn’t matter how much effort we made, and we all made unbelievable amounts of effort, we saw President Macron go, my Prime Minister regularly spoke to Putin - it didn’t matter."
