Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany Andrij Melnyk will leave office this fall, go back home to Kiev and become Deputy Foreign Minister, the Bild reported Monday, citing sources in the Ukrainian capital (Melnyk verlässt Deutschland).
Last Friday, Melnyk defended in an interview the good name of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera (Was Putin Wrong? Ukrainian Ambassador in Hot Water for Praising Nazi Collaborator).
After maintaining media silence, on Tuesday, the Ukrainian ambassador denied the accusations that he had denied Bandera’s role in the Holocaust and played down the Holocaust altogether. On Tuesday, he tweeted, with images of himself in the company of happy Lubavitchers: “I DETERMINATELY reject these absurd accusations! Everyone who knows me knows that I have always condemned the Holocaust in the strongest terms! The Nazi crime of the Shoah is a common Jewish and Ukrainian tragedy.”
Liebe ??Freunde,
liebe jüdische Mitbürger,diese absurden Vorwürfe weise ich ENTSCHIEDEN zurück!
Jeder, der mich kennt, weiß: immer habe ich den #Holocaust auf das Schärfste verurteilt!
Das Nazi-Verbrechen der Schoa ist eine gemeinsame ????Tragödie ??https://t.co/g0Hmbr8WhM https://t.co/69CGpza9Gq pic.twitter.com/gsaHy7l5WA
— Andrij Melnyk (@MelnykAndrij) July 5, 2022
“The Holocaust was and remains a deadly blow to the heart and soul of every Ukrainian!” the ambassador tweeted some more. “My speech [on August 28, 2019] was about the Shoah during the German Nazi occupation of Ukraine & today’s tribute to their victims in Ukraine.”
In the interview he gave German reporter Tilo Jung, Melnyk said that reports of Bandera’s involvement in the mass murders of Poles and Jews are lies and a “Russian narrative.”
On Sunday, I cited several Bandera choice statements from the time before and during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine on what should be done with the country’s “outsiders” (that’s Jews, Poles, and Russians).
