Sergey Lavrov sinks to a bottomless pit of abusive propaganda

Vladimir Putin's toady foreign minister Sergey Lavrov sinks further and further in the estimation of his fellow diplomats around the world. Once thought of as a charming, clever, astute representative of the Kremlin voice on the planet, he is now a risible figure only to be condemned. Neither he nor Putin can ever again be treated as worthy members of the international community. It would for example be an outrageous decision if Putin were to be invited to the G20 summit in Indonesia in June. Lavrov's latest remark to ruin whatever reputation he had left was to insult all Jewish people by saying that Adolf Hitler was partly Jewish, by implication suggesting that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was justified because President Zelensky was Jewish and the country needed to be rid of Nazism. It would be laughable if it wasn't so obscene. It really is difficult to imagine how anyone of any decency is going to be able to do business with, let alone have meaningful diplomatic relations, in the future with Putin, Lavrov and the others of the Kremlin inner circle which poses a huge challenge in the years ahead. Clearly it is better to have communications and relations with a country the size and importance of Russia, especially as it retains a vast stockpile of nuclear weapons. But with the invasion and brutal slaughter of Ukrainian civilians and destruction of private property, how could any western leader sit down with Putin or Lavrov and expect purposeful engagement? The way things are going now in Ukraine, Putin is going to continue the destruction until he can declare the annexation of the two states in the Donbas region in the east and then challenge the rest of the world to aquiesce, as it effectively did when he annexed Crimea in 2014. That would be just like when the West, led by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, allowed Hitler to grab Sudetenland in western Czechoslvakia in return for world peace in 1938. Surely we can't repeat that abomination of an agreement?