Ukrainian President Zelensky has refused a visit by German President Steinmeier to Kyiv, Bild reported.
Zelenski made it clear that he was not ready for this moment of meeting. The reason is Steinmeier’s close relations with Russia and Putin in recent years. Before becoming president, he was twice a foreign minister. To this is added Steinmeier’s positive attitude towards Nord Stream 2. Bild cites information from a Ukrainian diplomat who is not sure that Zelensky’s attitude towards his German counterpart is subject to change.
At a press conference this afternoon, together with Polish President Duda Steinmeier, he did not answer the question of whether he was planning a visit to Ukraine. The country has already been visited by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Austrian Chancellor Nehamer, EC President Ursula von der Leyen, and Joseph Borrell. Later today, Steinmeier confirmed to reporters that he was ready to visit Kyiv with his colleagues from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, but “Ukrainian authorities considered his presence undesirable,” UNIAN reported.
Last week, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier admitted for the first time mistakes in German policy toward Russia. “My support for Nord Stream 2 was undoubtedly a mistake. We insisted on it, even when Russia no longer believed, and our partners warned us,” the president said in Berlin today, SPIEGEL reported. “We can take a bitter balance: We have failed to build a common European home in which Russia can participate. Our approach to including Russia in the common architecture of European security has failed.”
Steinmeier has recently been widely criticized for not making a public assessment of misjudgments in German politics, especially when he was a foreign minister. He stressed that Vladimir Putin was responsible for the war. “We shouldn’t whip ourselves. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make sense of our own mistakes.”
He acknowledged as a mistake that he believed that Putin would not push his country to moral, economic, and political collapse due to imperial madness. Steinmeier stressed that with Putin’s Russia, a return to the pre-war situation is impossible. One of the strongest voices against Steinmeier’s political behavior is Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin, Andrei Melnik.
In a series of interviews, he described how German rulers reacted on the day of the attack on Ukraine – ministers told him that in just a few hours Ukraine would be overrun and that Germany was ready to work with the government that would appoint Putin. Melnik also reacted sharply against Steinmeier. He did not attend the charity concert for Ukraine, organized by the president, due to the participation of many Russian musicians.
In an interview with Tagesspiegel yesterday, Melnik said that over the years, as head of the German Foreign Ministry, Steinmeier had established a whole network of contacts with Russia and that the German president had a suspicious closeness to the Kremlin.
