After Ukrainian authorities said in mid-April that German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was not welcome in Ukraine over his alleged ties to Russia, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reconciled with Steinmeier in a phone call on Thursday and invited him and GermanChancellor Olaf Scholz to Kyiv.
Steinmeier had expressed his “solidarity, respect and support for the courageous struggle of the Ukrainian people against the Russian aggressor” in the phone call with Zelenskyy, the spokesperson of the German president said on Thursday.
Both presidents had described the conversation as “very important” and “very good”.
According to information received by AFP, Zelenskyy also invited Steinmeier and Scholz to Ukraine.
Ukraine’s announcement that Steinmeier was not welcome in Ukraine led to diplomatic tensions between Germany and Ukraine, with Scholz saying the move stood in his way of visiting.
“You can’t do that,” Scholz said earlier this week, which prompted fierce reactions from Ukrainian officials.
“It doesn’t sound very statesmanlike to behave like an offended liver sausage,” the Ukrainian ambassador, Andriy Melnyk, said on Tuesday (3 May).
Opposition leader and chief of the conservative CDU, Friedrich Merz, said that he was responsible for the Zelenskyy’s diplomatic U-turn after meeting the Ukrainian president earlier this week.
“I am very grateful to President Zelenskyy for accepting my request for an invitation from the Federal President. The way is clear for personal meetings of the Federal President and the Federal Chancellor with President Zelenskyy in Kyiv,” Merz said on Twitter on Thursday.
The office of the federal president also confirmed that Merz advocated for the invitation of Steinmeier.
Scholz has so far refrained from commenting on whether he will take Zelenskyy up on the invitation. Asked by journalists on Thursday if he would travel to Kyiv, he only referred to the planned trip by Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who already announced that she would visit Ukraine on Sunday (1 May).
Other high-ranking German politicians have also announced their planned visit. On Thursday, the President of the Bundestag, Bärbel Bas, who belongs to Scholz’s and Steinmeier’s SPD, announced that she would visit Kyiv this Sunday.
Bas is the first higher ranking representative of Germany to travel to Ukraine since the onset of the Russian war of aggression. She stated that her visit would be an “icebreaker” for future travels of government members.
Bas wanted to travel to Ukraine “to commemorate all victims of the Second World War together with her Ukrainian counterpart Ruslan Stefantschuk at his invitation and to hold political talks,” a Bundestag spokeswoman told the dpa.
[Edited by Alice Taylor]
Source: euractiv.com
