Next trip abroad: Selenskyj travels to Rome on Saturday

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyj travels to Western Europe at the weekend. While a visit to Germany is still unclear, Italy officially confirmed the guest’s visit from Kiev. President Sergio Mattarella will receive Selenskyj on Saturday, the presidential palace in Rome announced. Talks with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Pope Francis are also planned. Concrete processes have not yet been communicated – also for security reasons.

Zelenskyy’s onward journey to Germany has also not been confirmed so far. On Sunday he will be awarded the renowned Charlemagne Prize in Aachen on behalf of the Ukrainian people. Whether he will come in person remains an open question, as does a prior visit to Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin.

This would be Zelenskyj’s first visit to Germany after the Russian attack on his country at the end of February 2022. Recently there had been upset in Berlin because the police surprisingly announced that they were going to arrest the Ukrainian President on the weekend of April 13/14. expect May. For security reasons, Selenskyj’s trips abroad are usually not extensively announced.

Meeting with President and Prime Minister

In Italy, too, hardly any official details about the visit were communicated by Friday afternoon. According to media reports, Zelenskyj could first be received by President Mattarella in his official residence, the Quirinal Palace. Prime Minister Meloni also wants to meet the Ukrainian. The ultra-right politician has been vehemently in favor of supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia since taking power in autumn 2022 – while other members of the government attracted attention with some rather controversial statements about the conflict. Meloni traveled to Kiev in February.

The Vatican is working on a meeting between the Pope and Zelensky. For more than a year, Pope Francis has repeatedly called on the faithful to pray for “tortured Ukraine” and regularly appealed to Kiev and Moscow to agree on a ceasefire. The 86-year-old head of the Catholic Church has not yet accepted invitations to the Ukrainian capital. The physically ailing pontiff repeatedly emphasized that he only wanted to travel to Kiev if he was also received in Moscow.

Francis had recently indicated to journalists that a Vatican “mission” related to the war was currently underway. He did not give details. It is still unclear whether he meant Zelenskyy’s visit to Rome and the Vatican or something else.

Selenskyj most recently in Helsinki and The Hague

The Ukrainian President recently visited other European cities under strict security measures, such as Helsinki and The Hague in the Netherlands in early May, where the International Criminal Court is based. He has also been to London, Paris, Brussels and before that to Washington.

In the West, Zelenskyy has been campaigning for support since the beginning of the war and, due to the ongoing bombardment by Russia, also for arms deliveries. The majority of Germans, however, would like Ukraine and Russia to negotiate a peace solution. In a survey by the opinion research institute YouGov on behalf of the German Press Agency, 55 percent are in favor of talks aimed at ending the war. Only 28 percent are against it.

The majority of respondents rejected Ukraine’s invitation to join NATO, which Zelenskyy also called for. 54 percent are against and only 27 percent are in favor of holding out the prospect of Ukraine becoming a member of the defense alliance at this point in time.