Formally, Olaf Scholz is of course right: Anyone who declares the president of a country to be undesirable cannot count on the head of government coming to visit.
Scholz owes this to Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and there is much to suggest that the Chancellor would not have behaved differently if it were not an old party friend.
Kiev's defiant reaction to the announcement that Steinmeier would travel to Ukraine alongside its Polish and Baltic presidents was naïve and thoughtless.
Especially since Steinmeier had shortly before admitted to mistakes in Germany's Russia policy, which he had played a key role in shaping.
From the Ukrainian point of view, one does not have to be content with that.
But it shouldn't take much effort to recognize Steinmeier's gesture.
According to the motto: Not like that
Scholz, for his part, has now set the condition that Kiev's faux pas must first be made up for.
Otherwise he will not travel to Kyiv.
After all, it is about the country that is supporting Ukraine to an exceptional degree in the war against Russia.
In other words: we don't have to put up with that.
Scholz may want to emphasize Germany's strength.
But he does the opposite with it.
He is only showing the weakness that has accompanied his politics for weeks, communicatively far more than factually.
Although Germany is helping the country attacked by Russia on a large scale, the impression is repeatedly made that it is hesitating and hesitating.
Vanity or Responsibility?
But anyone who thought that this was the last mold to be thrown in the German-Ukrainian sandbox was wrong.
The Ukrainian ambassador Andriy Melnyk described the chancellor as "offended liverwurst".
It would be very naïve to get Scholz and Steinmeier to immediately ask for an invitation to Kyiv.
Even an observer who pays attention to state-political forms has to ask himself: what's the point?
Isn't this much more about vanity than responsibility?
While apocalyptic conditions prevail in parts of Ukraine, do you gentlemen have nothing better to do?
In any case, it should be easy for an ambassador to lay the foundations for Steinmeier's visit.
For the German Federal President and the Chancellor, on the other hand, it is not too much to ask not to see Ukraine and its representatives as "normal" interlocutors, but as a state and politics in an extreme state of emergency, politically and psychologically.
Germany's strength would lie in adapting to it and not losing sight of the Ukrainians' Sacher because of all the Melnyks.