During a telephone conversation with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Vladimir Zelensky eliminated "misunderstandings of the past."

So, at least, both official Kyiv and official Berlin present the situation.

Let me partially disagree with this assessment.

The secondary “misunderstandings of the past” in the form of the demonstratively boorish attitude of Ukrainian officials towards the German president will probably really come to naught.

However, the main “misunderstanding of the past” — the categorical refusal of the Zelensky administration to implement the famous Steinmeier formula and the Minsk agreements — cannot be corrected or eliminated.

Shortly after coming to power in 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky told German journalists: “You know very well that neither I nor my team signed this Minsk.

But we are ready to go step by step towards the implementation of all the Minsk agreements so that we finally have peace.”

The readiness to “go on the points” meant the implementation of the Steinmeier formula, a political algorithm for the implementation of the Minsk agreements, proposed by the current German president back in 2015, when he was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany.

For the first four years, Steinmeier's formula was not fixed on paper and existed only in the form of "oral political creativity."

But at the initial stage of Zelensky's presidency, it finally turned into an official document, agreed upon by the plenipotentiaries of the leaders of Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia.

By the way, having put Russia in fourth place in the previous sentence, I acted quite consciously.

The general version of the Steinmeier formula was agreed on September 11, 2019.

And already in early October of the same year, the President of Germany paid a visit to Georgia.

During this trip, British journalists (it’s good that they weren’t “British scientists”) severely interrogated him about the fact that, while creating his formula, he acted under the “dictation of the Kremlin”.

I quote the then reports of news agencies: “When asked what was the role of the Russian Federation in creating this formula and whether the words of the fifth president of Ukraine, the leader of the European Solidarity party Petro Poroshenko, that this formula was “written in the Kremlin”, are true, Steinmeier replied: “I don’t I understand your question... The argument surprises me, because one of the representatives of the then president was present.”

The President of Ukraine at the time of the birth of the Steinmeier formula was none other than Petro Poroshenko.

It turns out that the fifth president of Ukraine accused the German politician of what he himself took a direct part in?

It turns out that way.

Is all this strange?

As it will become obvious a little later, it is not even strange at all.

Explaining the reason for creating his formula in Tbilisi in 2019, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, among other things, stated the following: “There was a situation in the negotiations in Paris, which were held at the summit meeting of the Norman Contact Group.

The negotiations were not moving forward... The steps that both sides had to take were too big.

That is why the formula does not contain anything more than an attempt to make a number of smaller steps from the big steps that the parties to the


conflict did not want to take, which, despite


their essence and consequences, still need to be coordinated.

Poor, poor Frank-Walter Steinmeier!

Politics with his biography - let me remind you that the current President of Germany was the head of the department of the Federal Chancellor, twice served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Germany, and so on and so forth - it is somehow inconvenient to accuse him of dizzying political naivety.

However, some things have to be done, despite the fact that "it's inconvenient."

“Negotiations didn’t move forward,” not because “the steps that both sides had to take were too big,” but because the Zelensky administration didn’t want to take them in principle.

By breaking down "large and complex" steps into small and simple ones, Frank-Walter Steinmeier thought he was doing official Kyiv a significant political service.

However, from the point of view of the Zelensky administration, everything was exactly the opposite.

The Ukrainian authorities designed a complex and multi-layered scheme of political deception and tried to disguise everything to the maximum, purposefully confusing everything.

But then the simple-hearted (only in the opinion of official Kyiv) Steinmeier appears, and in the blink of an eye all the "clothing of the king" is lying on the ground in the form of dirty rags.

After agreeing on the Steinmeier formula, it finally became clear to everyone: the Minsk agreements are not being implemented not due to some objective reasons, but due to the fact that the Kyiv authorities do not want to implement them.

Is it worth it after that to be very surprised that the current president of Germany has turned into a character hated by the Ukrainian political elite?

In the eyes of a deceiver and schemer, the one who exposed him is necessarily a “bad person”.

It is a pity, of course, that this “bad man” did not become “even worse” in the eyes of official Kyiv.

If Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the entire German political elite had shown integrity and declared, say, at the end of last year, that the Minsk agreements were not being implemented due to the fault of the Ukrainian leadership, then who knows how events would have developed further?

Perhaps the current political crisis in Europe would not be so acute.

But to return now to this fork in history, alas, is no longer possible.

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.