BOUTCHA, Ukraine (Reuters) – German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock began a visit to Ukraine on Tuesday, the first by a senior member of the Berlin government since Russia invaded the country on February 24. latest.
Annalena Baerbock went first to Boutcha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, where Russian forces are suspected of having committed war crimes. Moscow rejects these allegations.
Many bodies of civilians were discovered in early April in the streets of this city northwest of the Ukrainian capital after its reconquest by Kyiv forces.
Accompanied by the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Annalena Baerbock demanded that those responsible for the alleged atrocities committed in the city be brought to justice.
“That’s what we owe the victims,” she said. “And those victims, you can feel it here very strongly, could have been us.”
The visit by the German foreign minister comes amid easing tensions between Berlin and Kyiv, sparked by past statements by the German government in favor of dialogue with Russia or Germany’s initial refusal to provide heavy weapons to Ukraine.
Germany has since become one of the main arms suppliers to Ukraine and defends the application of heavy sanctions against Russia, including the possibility of an embargo on Russian oil.
In mid-April, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a long-time supporter of a policy of reconciliation with Moscow and a social-democratic ally of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, claimed that a visit he was planning to make to Ukraine had deemed undesirable by Kyiv authorities.
The dispute now seems settled, Olaf Scholz and Frank-Walter Steinmeier having been invited by Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky to visit the country.
(Report Reuters Television and Alexander Ratz in Berlin, French version Jean-Stéphane Brosse, edited by Sophie Louet)
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