"Critical level". Russian footballers were harassed in Finland, provoking a hysteria in Zakharova

In Finland, during a First League football match between TPS from Turku and Jaro from Pietarsaari, fans began shouting insults at Russian Jaro players Sergei Lazarev and Sergei Eremenko, Yle reports. As a result, the match was interrupted at the end of the first half.

Lazarev is a Russian citizen. Eremenko, who was born in Pietarsaari in 1999, has two passports. His older brothers Alexey and Roman played dozens of matches for the Finnish national team. In 2018, Sergey wanted to play for the Russian national team and changed his football citizenship.

During a break in the match, stadium staff identified the troublemakers and removed 7 fans from the stands. Later, TPS director Kim Ekroos apologized for the fans' behavior.

This incident provoked a real hysteria at the Russian Embassy in Finland, as well as the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova.

"We are forced to state once again the critical level of Russophobic sentiment in Finland, which, unfortunately, has long since spread to the field of sports, largely facilitated by the connivance of the country's official authorities. In such an atmosphere, racist sentiments in general are intensifying, and it is not the first time that a match has been stopped due to racist shouts from fans against players of other nationalities," the embassy said.

Zakharova believes that such manifestations indicate that Finnish society, which has signed up to all international legal provisions, is allegedly unprepared and unable to protect itself from such manifestations.

"They need to remember that northern and central Europe has already gone through this, in the 30s and 40s of the last century. It started in the same way: nationalist cries with segregation of people on the basis of nationality and the refusal of the authorities to cover those who called for "new crusades" against people of a certain religion or ethnicity. Therefore, all this escalated into a bloodbath of the Second World War," Zakharova said in an interview with Match TV.

Such words of the Russian diplomat provoked ridicule from her compatriots.

"Darn, she brought Nazism here too) And the fact that Jews were sent to gulags in the USSR is probably not true, right?", "A speck in someone else's eye is a speck in their own log," users write.

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