Scholz to visit Kyiv as arms criticism continues to grow

OLAF SCHOLZ will visit Kyiv with Mario Draghi, the Italian prime minister, and Emmanuel Macron, the French president, this month, a German newspaper reported yesterday, as criticism over arms deliveries continued to grow.

The German chancellor will visit the Ukrainian capital before the G7 summit at the end of June, Bild am Sonntag said, citing French and Ukrainian officials.

It comes as Mr Scholz faces criticism over arms commitments. Oleksiy Arestovych, a military adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, told The Guardian: “If we had all the weapons the Germans had been talking about, we would have kicked out the Russians, Kherson would have been liberated.”

German arms company Rheinmetall yesterday said six Marder fighting vehicles were ready to go to Ukraine. It has been preparing 100 Marder vehicles and 88 Leopard tanks, but Berlin has not yet approved their deployment.

On Friday, Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, said “no unit of heavy equipment” had been delivered, but that Kyiv expected to receive seven German howitzers this month.

Criticism over arms from the opposition continued as Norbert Röttgen, a foreign policy specialist who battled to succeed Angela Merkel in the Christian Democratic Union party, told Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung that “in the most difficult and costly weeks for Ukraine, nothing can be expected from the federal government in terms of weapons”.

Mr Scholz spent the weekend in the Western Balkans building support for EU sanctions on Russia. But Aleksandar Vuvic, the Serbian president, said: “We do not think sanctions are efficient.”