Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Oleksii Makeiev, on Thursday welcomed the decision taken by the German parliament to exclude Russia and Belarus from the main commemorative event marking the end of World War II in Berlin.
“It underlines the consistent attitude of the German Bundestag and the German government towards representatives of the criminal regime,” Makeiev told dpa in Berlin ahead of the event on May 8 to mark 80 years since the end of the war.
May 8 was about confronting the past and preventing war, and not about denial of history to justify war, he said.
The Bundestag had earlier announced that while the Diplomatic Corps had been invited to its commemorative event, the representatives of Russia and Belarus had been excluded on the advice of the Foreign Office.
The Foreign Office has justified its decision to advise against inviting representatives of the two countries to commemorative events on the grounds that Russia could exploit them and “abuse them to link them to its war of aggression against Ukraine.”
Russian ambassador Sergei Nechayev nevertheless participated on Wednesday in an event on the Seelow Heights to the east of Berlin, where the largest battle of World War II on German territory took place.
The battle is believed to have claimed the lives of 33,000 Red Army soldiers, 2,000 Polish soldiers fighting with the Russians and 16,000 German soldiers.