From BZ/dpa
A valiant fighter for his country’s concerns has had to vacate his post: Andriy Melnyk has been recalled as Ukrainian ambassador to Germany. Now he has commented on his dismissal.
Melnyk has been ambassador to Germany since January 2015 – an exceptionally long time for a diplomat in one post. Commentators in Kyiv also said on Saturday that this was about double the usual posting time.
By his own admission, leaving Germany is not easy for Melnyk. “Germany remains in our hearts,” he told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” on Sunday. “It’s hard for us to say goodbye.”
Melnyk continued: “I was in Germany twice, I have a very close relationship with this country, which was also a kind of love-hate relationship.”
His term of office will formally “probably end in a few weeks,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. Then he and his family would emigrate to Ukraine. During his time as ambassador, i.e. since the beginning of the Russian-controlled war in eastern Ukraine, he had “rejected other job offers” in order to be able to continue his mission in Germany.
Melnyk made a name for himself as a harsh critic of the German government not only since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Again and again he denounced in particular the German Russia policy. In the past few months, he has not spared sharp criticism of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD). Among other things, he accused the SPD politician and his ministers of being too hesitant to deliver weapons to fight the Russian attackers in Ukraine. He once described the chancellor as an “offended liverwurst”.
“In retrospect, I regret many emotional statements.”
Most recently, the 46-year-old himself came under massive criticism for statements about the Ukrainian nationalist and anti-Semite Stepan Bandera. During World War II he was the leader of the radical wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Nationalist partisans from western Ukraine were responsible for ethnically motivated expulsions in 1943, in which tens of thousands of Polish and Jewish civilians were murdered.
In an interview with journalist Tilo Jung, Melnyk denied that Bandera was a mass murderer of Jews and Poles. The nationalist was deliberately demonized by the Soviet Union. The Israeli embassy then accused the ambassador of “distorting historical facts, playing down the Holocaust and insulting those who were murdered by Bandera and his people”.
Germany
Melnyk then said nothing about it for days, but then responded to the allegations with a tweet on Tuesday. He also expressly addressed his words to the “dear Jewish fellow citizens”. Melnyk spoke of absurd allegations, which he firmly rejected. “Everyone who knows me knows: I have always condemned the Holocaust in the strongest possible terms.” The Nazi crimes of the Holocaust are a tragedy shared by Ukraine and Israel.
In an interview with the “Schwäbische Zeitung” he recently admitted errors in his communication. He can understand criticism of his person. “We are all human and we make mistakes. You also try to correct these mistakes and learn from them. In retrospect, I regret many emotional statements.”