Overview
- Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova made the accusation at a plenary session of an international forum on media and historical falsification on November 13.
- She said Corriere della Sera sent questions and Sergey Lavrov prepared several pages of answers before the paper said it had no room to run them in full.
- The ministry said it offered to have the full text posted on the paper’s site or linked to the Russian embassy’s site, but only a sharply shortened version with the paper’s commentary appeared.
- Zakharova asserted that passages relating to neo-Nazism were removed and framed this as Western sensitivity tied to migration, Russophobia and Europe’s fascist legacy.
- Corriere della Sera said the interview contained many disputed claims requiring fact-checking or clarification that would exceed reasonable length, a defense Zakharova later rejected in a Telegram post.