Angela Merkel's visit to Kyiv is a gesture of solidarity. And it is a particularly important one for her Ukraine audience, the most extreme of whom had feared that a "Merkel-Putin pact" was in the making.
Angela Merkel rarely visits Kyiv. In her nearly nine-year tenure as chancellor, she has only been in the Ukrainian capital one time – six years ago. It was a short visit on July 21, 2008 that only lasted a few hours. The Ukranian president at the time was Viktor Yuschenko. The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung – a German right-center political foundation – described the joint press conference in as a “cold shower” for the head of state from Kyiv. Admittedly, Merkel supported his pro-western course but rejected a swift approach of Ukraine to NATO and the European Union. Yuschenko’s successor, Viktor Yanukovych, never visited Merkel. Berlin kept its distance from those authoritarian politics.
