Minister Wopke Hoekstra (Foreign Affairs) is in Ukraine on Tuesday for an unannounced visit. He will speak there with, among others, his counterpart Dmytro Kuleba and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports.
The minister started his visit this morning in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, he writes on Twitter. There he saw “the dramatic impact that the war is having on the lives of the men, women and children who live here”. “This cannot go unpunished,” said Hoekstra.
Hoekstra also visited Ukraine on February 2, together with Prime Minister Mark Rutte. That was before the Russian invasion of that country. Hoekstra and Rutte then also spoke with Zelensky and Kuleba.
Hoekstra will also reopen the Dutch embassy in Kyiv today. The Dutch embassy staff returned there at the end of April. The security situation allowed that again, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A few weeks earlier, the staff had already returned to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the embassy had moved there temporarily.