Steinmeier, a former foreign minister and former ally of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, is on a state visit to Poland to discuss the implications of the Russian war in Ukraine with his Polish counterpart, Andrei Duda. According to a report in the German newspaper Bild, Steinmeier had planned to travel to Kyiv with the presidents of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland on Wednesday. However, his request for a meeting was rejected by Zelensky, with Bild citing the German Social Democrat’s close ties to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his history as a supporter of close Russian-German economic ties. “We all know Steinmeier’s close ties to Russia, which have also been characterized by the Steinmeier formula,” an unnamed Ukrainian diplomat told Bild. “At the moment he is not welcome in Kyiv. “We will see if that changes one day.” The “Steinmeier formula” was a proposal made by the then Foreign Minister in 2016 in order to break the deadlock in the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia for peace in eastern Ukraine. The proposal, a simplified version of the Minsk agreements, provided for elections in territories controlled by separatists under Ukrainian law, under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The attempt failed as neither Moscow nor Kyiv implemented the Minsk agreement. On Tuesday afternoon, Steinmeier appeared to confirm that his request for a meeting with Zelensky in Kyiv had been rejected by Ukraine. The German president said he wanted to travel to Kyiv “to send a strong message of European solidarity to Ukraine”. “I was prepared,” Steinmeier said. “But obviously – and I must admit – it was not desirable in Kyiv.” The embarrassing rejection comes as German Chancellor Olaf Solz came under fire for not having traveled to Ukraine himself so far, unlike British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and EU leader Ursula von der Leyen. Steinmeier recently acknowledged the failure of his previous strategy for a Western rapprochement with Moscow. “I insist [the Baltic Sea pipeline project] “Nord Stream 2, that was definitely a mistake,” he said in Berlin on April 4. “We were kept on bridges that Russia no longer believed in and that our partners warned us about.” He added: “We have failed to build a common European home. “I did not believe that Vladimir Putin would embrace the complete economic, political and moral destruction of his country for the sake of his imperial madness.”
