An air raid alarm during his visit to Koryukivka in Ukraine forced Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to stay in an air-raid shelter for an hour and a half. "Our visit began with an air raid alarm and we spent the first hour and a half in the air raid shelter," Steinmeier said on Tuesday, according to an audio recording in the northern Ukrainian city near the Belarusian border. In the city he got an idea of the destruction caused by the Russian war of aggression.
Steinmeier had arrived in Kyiv in the morning, it was his first trip to Ukraine since the start of the Russian war of aggression. "It is important to me to send a sign of solidarity to the Ukrainians right now, in the phase of the vile Russian airstrikes across the country," Steinmeier said on his arrival in the capital.
A little later he himself was hit by an air raid alarm in Koryukivka. "That gave us a particularly impressive insight into the conditions under which people live here," said the Federal President.
Koryukivka had been occupied by Russian troops at the beginning of the war of aggression. The occupiers have withdrawn, but the city is struggling with destroyed infrastructure and supply shortages before the onset of winter. Steinmeier praised the courage of the residents "who opposed the tanks with their bare hands and actually made them stop".
In the meantime, the power supply has been repaired to some extent, the President reported. And a district heating plant is being converted so that it can be heated with wood from the region. According to Steinmeier, Germany is helping "a little", among other things with technology that is being made available by the German side.
Steinmeier had already visited Koryukivka a year ago, before the start of the Ukraine war. There he had taken part in a commemoration event for the victims of the German occupation in World War II.
This time, too, the Federal President commemorated the victims of a massacre committed by the German Wehrmacht and SS in Koryukivka in 1943, in which more than 6,700 men, women and children were murdered within two days.
