Earlier, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs recommended the local authorities to exclude official representatives of Moscow and Minsk from participation in all upcoming events commemorating the anniversary of the end of the war. The ministry emphasized that Russia “uses the memory of World War II as a tool to achieve its goals and wrongly connects it with the war against Ukraine.”
The “Berliner Zeitung” newspaper quoted a document, which shows that if representatives of these countries appear without prior notification, “institutions can exercise the right to expel them at their own discretion.”
In response to these recommendations, a spokeswoman for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Maria Zacharowa called her German counterpart Berbock “a revenge and neo -Nazi”, and permission to expose Russian diplomats from the celebration of the victory “glaring insult”. In turn, the Russian ambassador in Germany Sergei Nieczaczew said that the recommendations of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs threaten the efforts to “reconcile” both countries.
Representatives of Russia and Belarus were also not invited to the celebrations commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps, which took place in Germany on April 6.
