Photo: Reuters
On Wednesday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that it was “irritating” that Germany’s president, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was not received when he wanted to visit Ukraine.
On Tuesday, Steinmeier, a proponent of reconciliation with Russia, said that Kyiv did not want him to visit.
A Ukrainian official has since denied that President Volodymyr Zelensky had rejected a visit from Steinmeier.
“The president would have liked to go to Ukraine and would have visited the president,” Scholz told RBB public radio.
“It would have been good to receive him. I don’t want to comment further. It is a little irritating, to be polite about it.”
Steinmeier said on Tuesday that he had planned to visit Kyiv with the presidents of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia “to send a strong signal of European solidarity with Ukraine … (but) that was not wanted in Kyiv.”
In an interview with CNN, Serhiy Leshchenko, an adviser to Zelensky’s chief of staff, denied that Zelensky had rejected the visit.
Germany’s mass-selling Bild newspaper reported that Zelenskiy had rejected Steinmeier’s plans to visit due to his close relations with Russia in recent years and his years of support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline that would have doubled the flow of Russian gas.
Germany has since suspended the project.
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