German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier poses with Polish President Andrzej Duda on April 12, 2022 at Belvedere Palace in Warsaw, Poland. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel
BERLIN, April 12 – A planned visit by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to Kyiv was not welcomed by Ukraine, he said on Tuesday after a report that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy Steinmeier’s historic commitment to Western rapprochement with Russia had criticized.
Steinmeier had planned to travel to Kyiv with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda and the presidents of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia “to send a strong signal of European solidarity with Ukraine there,” he told journalists during a visit to Warsaw .
“I was ready for that. But apparently – and I have to admit that – it wasn’t wanted in Kyiv,” he said without going into detail.
It was not immediately clear whether the other European heads of state and government would come without Steinmeier. Ukrainian authorities could not be immediately reached for comment.
The Bild newspaper reported earlier on Tuesday that Zelenskyy rejected Steinmeier’s plans to visit due to his close ties with Russia in recent years and his years of support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a project designed to double the flow of Russian gas directly to Germany but has since been cancelled. Continue reading
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a backlash on social media that tweeted images of Steinmeier lovingly hugging Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the president expressed regret for his earlier stance.
He said his support for Nord Stream 2 for years was clearly a mistake. Continue reading
When asked for comment on Steinmeier’s comments, a German government spokesman said: “Germany has been and continues to be one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters. … And it will stay that way.
“The Federal President takes a clear and unequivocal position on the side of Ukraine,” added the spokesman.
Steinmeier, a social democrat who was foreign minister under German Chancellor Angela Merkel before being appointed to the presidency, had known Russian President Vladimir Putin since 2001.
A speech that Putin gave to the German Bundestag in 2001 and in which he spoke German to members of parliament gave Steinmeier hope for better relations between Moscow and Berlin, he told Spiegel magazine in an interview published on Tuesday.
“This Putin of 2001 has nothing in common with the Putin of 2022, whom we now see as a brutal, entrenched warmonger,” Steinmeier said.
Reporting by Riham Alcousaa and Andreas Rinke; Adaptation by Leslie Adler