United States Ambassador Ken Salazar has rebuked Mexican lawmakers for showing support for Russia despite that country’s invasion of Ukraine.

A group of deputies from the ruling Morena party, the Labor Party and the Institutional Revolutionary Party formally established a Mexico-Russia friendship group on Wednesday.

Speaking to members of the Mexico-United States friendship group in the lower house of Congress on Thursday, Salazar said the two North American countries have to be as united now as they were during the Second World War.

“We have to be in solidarity with Ukraine and against Russia,” the ambassador said.

“I believe that the ambassador of Russia, who was here yesterday making noise, [said] that Mexico and Russia were very close. Sorry, that can never happen, it can never happen,” he told lower house lawmakers.

“In World War II there was no distance between Mexico and the United States, [we were] united against what Hitler and the others were doing to defeat humanity and freedom,” Salazar said.

He said the Russian invasion of Ukraine is something that he thought he would never see and warned that the war could affect Mexico.

“I’m asking you, the deputies who have so much strength … [to see] what Russia did in attacking Ukraine – it’s an attack against freedom and the way of life of all of us,” Salazar said.

“… There can’t be differences [between us]. We have to do the same thing that the two countries did in the time of World War II,” he reiterated.

Morena lower house leader Ignacio Mier Velazco asked that Mexico’s position with regard to the conflict in Ukraine not be distorted.

“We’ve vigorously condemned [the invasion],” he said, asserting that the creation of a friendship group didn’t change Mexico’s position.

“[Mexico] condemns the invasion of one country by another because Mexico has experienced this historically,” Mier said, citing 19th century French intervention and the 16th century Spanish conquest.

With reports from Reforma