The controversial Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, has been recalled by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This emerged from a decree published by the President’s Office in Kyiv on Saturday. The diplomat was recently criticized for statements about the Ukrainian nationalist and anti-Semite Stepan Bandera. Melnyk was accused of playing down the Holocaust.
Previously, he had repeatedly sharply criticized German politics. He was also given joint responsibility for the scandal surrounding the uninviting of Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier by Kyiv at the beginning of April. He then accused Chancellor Olaf Scholz of being an “offended liverwurst” because he didn’t want to visit Ukraine himself. Melnyk had to apologize for this statement afterwards.
Further ambassadors recalled
Melnyk said of Bandera that he was “not a mass murderer of Jews and Poles.” There was sharp criticism for this from Poland and Israel, and the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry also distanced itself from the diplomat’s statement. Bandera-led Ukrainian partisans carried out ethnically motivated expulsions in 1943, killing tens of thousands of Polish and Jewish civilians. Bandera fled to Germany after World War II and was murdered there in 1959 by an agent of the Soviet secret service KGB.
As the Ukrinform news agency reports, other ambassadors were recalled in addition to Melnyk. These are Lyubov Nepop (Hungary), Vyacheslav Jatsjuk (Norway), Yevhen Perebjinis (Czech Republic) and Igor Policha (India).