Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov made "grossly false and abhorrent" claims in an Italian television interview. But in Italy - unlike in Russia - there is freedom of speech, according to premier Mario Draghi.
"In Italy, we have freedom of expression. Minister Lavrov is from a country where there is no freedom of expression," Draghi told reporters on Monday.
"This country allows people to express their opinions freely, even when they are grossly false and abhorrent. What Minister Lavrov said is abhorrent," Draghi underlined.
Draghi's comments came after Lavrov's interview with Italy's private Rete 4 TV on Sunday, in which he denied that Russian forces had murdered hundreds of civilians in the town of Bucha outside Kiev before they withdrew from the area in late March, calling the claim "fake".
In the Rete 4 interview, Lavrov also claimed that Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky's Jewishness does not negate his Nazism since Germany's wartime Nazi leader Adolf Hitler also “had Jewish blood".