On Sunday Angela Merkel paid Ukraine, as she said, as Chancellor "probably a bilateral farewell visit".

She began by laying a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, with which she wanted to commemorate the German attack on the Soviet Union and thus also on the Ukraine in the summer of 80 years ago.

Gerhard Gnauck

Political correspondent for Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania based in Warsaw.

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Friedrich Schmidt

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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War, occupation and the Holocaust claimed around eight million victims in what was then the Soviet republic. When the army orchestra intoned the march “Free Ukraine” at the end of the ceremony and the Chancellor went to the motorcade, some onlookers waved, one shouted “Merkel, Merkel”, another in English “Nice to see you”. That fitted in with the words the visitor later said in her press conference: Today both countries are "on friendly terms".

The war of that time is of course no longer the main concern of the people in the country today.

When the Ukrainians, in two protest movements in 2004 and 2014 against election fraud and arbitrariness, gradually and increasingly clearly spoke out in favor of rapprochement with the European Union, Russia, which had been militarily strengthened under President Vladimir Putin, took action.

The neighbor in the north annexed the Crimea and intervened in the eastern part of Ukraine, at times through to combat operations of its own troops, with which the existence of the "People's Republics" DNR and LNR, loyal to Moscow, should be secured.

Around two million people then fled the Donbass, the most densely populated region of the country until then.

Trench warfare in eastern Ukraine is still simmering

At that time - after the first violent border change in Europe since the Second World War - Merkel intervened, took France in tow and forced two rounds of negotiations in the Belarusian city of Minsk. The de facto war opponents Ukraine and Russia - represented by Presidents Petro Poroshenko and Putin - also had to sit down at a table there.

Since then, this group of states, the so-called Normandy Format, has been working on conflict resolution in eastern Ukraine. For years there has been simmering senseless positional warfare, in which neither side is allowed to advance. Nevertheless, there is shooting almost every day, yet soldiers and civilians die again and again, including last week. This is testified by the OSCE observers who patrol the region, even if they are repeatedly refused passage or their observation drones are obstructed by jammers, as was the case most recently, especially by the DNR and LNR fighters.

For another minute of silence, the German Chancellor appeared in front of a chapel that honors the pro-European demonstrators killed on the Kievan Majdan in 2014. At that time, a development had begun in Ukraine that led to an aggressive turnaround in Russia's foreign policy and the stationing of troops from NATO allies in Poland and the Baltic States.

After her meeting with President Volodymyr Selenskyj in the baroque Marienpalais, the Chancellor said that the Normandy negotiations “are not progressing as we would like”. Especially since the beginning of the pandemic, the Donbass region has in fact been divided into two parts by an impermeable dividing line. The opening of further "border crossings" agreed with Putin, among others, is not progressing, said Merkel; and that puts a lot of strain on the process. “I advocate having another meeting at the presidential level”. There is no other round of talks than the Normandy format.