In his interview with the BBC, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov responded to his British counterpart’s remark, at the same time emphasizing that he was not judging Johnson and suggested “letting him have fun.”
“In 1938, the English team played [football] against Germany, when 1936 was already in the past. There are plenty of pictures on the Internet in which both German and English players give the Nazi salute to Hitler,” Lavrov told the BBC.
Boris Johnson has compared the upcoming football tournament held in Russia to the 1936 Olympics under Adolf Hitler amid speculation that Moscow was behind the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.