The German naval commander Kay-Achim Schönbach made several scandalous statements about Ukraine, in particular about Crimea. He said that Crimea would never become Ukrainian. He later clarified that this was only his personal opinion.
Kay-Achim Schönbach stressed that he was not expressing the official position of the state. The German military officer wrote this in his tweet on 22 January.
Earlier, the German Defence Ministry denied Schönbach’s words. They assured that they did not share his views on the “lost Crimea”. The vice-admiral was summoned to the agency for an explanation.
The German MIA commander later confirmed on social media that the scandalous remarks during a conference at the Indian Institute of Defence Studies were his personal opinion.
“Careless, misjudged the situation, I shouldn’t have done that. There is no reason to interpret, it was clearly a mistake,” stressed Schönbach.
What Schönbach had previously said
The German military commander said that Crimea, which was occupied by Russia in 2014, would allegedly never return to Ukraine again.
“The Crimean peninsula is lost. This is a fact,” Schönbach noted. This, he said, was a serious obstacle to our state’s membership in NATO.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry condemned such statements. The ministry subsequently summoned Anka Feldhausen, Germany’s ambassador to Ukraine, for an explanation.