Andriy Melnyk remembers September 5, 2015 well.

It was the day when Germany and Russia agreed to build the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline.

"It was like a blow to me.

I was speechless," said Melnyk in his office in the Ukrainian embassy in the center of Berlin, very close to the Deutsches Theater.

Markus Wehner

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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A year and a half after Russia's covert attack on Crimea and its subsequent annexation, the barely concealed Russian war effort in eastern Ukraine, the shooting down of the MH 17 plane by Moscow-led separatists with almost 300 dead, Germany decided to build a second pipeline through the Baltic Sea, which should bring even more Russian gas to Germany bypassing the Ukraine.

"Until then, I had trusted Merkel almost blindly," says Melnyk.

But now he was deeply disappointed by the Chancellor, who for a long time defended the construction of the line as a purely private-sector project - just as her successor Olaf Scholz did until a few weeks ago.

But Melnyk continued to fight, not only against Nord Stream 2. Wherever he could, he pointed out that Russia was at war in Ukraine and that Putin's goal was to conquer the neighboring country and destroy Ukraine as a nation.

But most Germans didn't want to hear that.

In February 2021, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier defended the construction of Nord Stream 2. The pipeline is "almost the last bridge between Russia and Europe," he said in an interview, referring in this context to Germany's guilt in World War II more than 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.

"We must not lose sight of this bigger picture," said the Federal President.

Melnyk's criticism of Steinmeier

Melnyk jerked the hat cord.

It was "cynical" to bring the National Socialist reign of terror into play in the pipeline debate.

"By erroneously equating Russia with the Soviet Union, especially in this extremely sensitive context, the immeasurable suffering of other peoples of the USSR during the Nazi tyranny is completely ignored," criticized the ambassador.

Steinmeier defended the gas pipeline with "questionable historical arguments".

The plea in favor of Nord Stream 2 "and above all the strange justification with war guilt against Russia hit us Ukrainians like a double punch in the face," Melnyk raged on television.

And: "We found it amazing that the souls of dead people were thrown into the balance, declared them to be a bargaining chip in order to push a very dangerous pipeline."

A diplomat who approaches the German head of state in such a public way is actually an inadmissible act in German politics. Since this incident at the latest, Melnyk has been considered an ambassador in German politics who disregards the rules of diplomatic decency and therefore has to be cut, others simply as a pain in the ass.

The state secretary in the Ministry of Construction, the SPD politician Sören Bartol, made it clear once again how Melnyk is still seen in wide political circles in Berlin.

"I now find this 'ambassador' unbearable," Bartol wrote on Twitter because Melnyk had criticized Chancellor Scholz.

The SPD politician later deleted the tweet and apologized.

His statement made it clear once again what people think of Melnyk in the SPD and beyond.

Among other things, the ambassador had commented on Chancellor Scholz's refusal to impose an oil and gas embargo on Russia, saying that it was "a knife in the back" of Ukraine.