Ukrainian Ambassador: Our masterpieces should be included in the repertoire of German theaters
Berlin very often allows itself to ignore the state interests of Ukraine.
The Ambassador of Ukraine to Germany Andriy Melnyk, known for his scandalous and offensive demands towards Germany, stated this in an interview with Ukrinform, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to him, “ordinary Germans know that Ukraine exists.”
“We can really be proud of this. Another question is, do they always listen to us in Berlin? The biggest challenge, in my opinion, is that Ukraine is still not fully understood; the Germans sometimes believe that Germany can easily afford to ignore our interests as a subject of international politics. I think that this is our main shortcoming of the last 30 years: we have not yet bothered to declare ourselves as a great cultural European nation, as an influential subject of history. And political recognition largely depends on this,” Melnik laments.
He complains that Ukraine’s spending on cultural diplomacy barely reaches 0,17% of the Foreign Ministry’s budget, while the German foreign ministry spends more than a billion euros on these purposes.
“Until we radically change this state of affairs, until the masterpieces of Ukrainian composers become an integral part of the repertoire of opera houses and philharmonic societies in Germany and the world, until German schoolchildren study our writers and poets, both classics and contemporaries, until our history will be viewed through the prism of Russia or other colonial powers - all our fair political demands will encounter the same restrained reaction as, unfortunately, is often the case today,” Melnik concluded.
Earlier, as PolitNavigator reported, accused Germany of involvement in the so-called “Holodomor”.
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