Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has urged the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to make a powerful political statement by visiting Kyiv on 9 May, the day German leaders have often travelled to Moscow to mark Russia’s Victory Day, a memorial to the 27 million Russians killed in the second world war.
The invitation to Scholz and the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, follows weeks of intense Ukrainian criticism of Germany over its reluctance to supply weapons or support an EU-wide embargo on Russian energy imports. Germany is especially dependent on Russia for gas and says it would suffer more from an embargo than Russia.
