In his opinion, it is the FRG that has a “moral duty” to play a decisive role in this issue, since it is responsible to Ukraine for the violence of the National Socialists. The ambassador noted that the peninsula in this situation had a particularly tragic fate, which in the current German society is not customary to remember:
“The moral duty of the Federal Republic comes from Germany’s historical responsibility to Ukraine for Nazi tyranny. Germany has twice occupied Crimea by military means in the last century”, – Melnik writes in an article for the Berliner Zeitung.
Therefore, the diplomat believes, Germany, given its “colonial past in Crimea” and the millions of Ukrainian victims of fascist terror, should use all political and economic instruments to “return” the peninsula to Ukraine.