Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, says Zelenskiy has refused to receive him dozens of times since the war began

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko says in an interview with German media that there is no unity among leading politicians in Ukraine even now, something he says is illustrated by the fact that President Zelensky has not received him in an audience since the beginning of the war .

“Unfortunately, in this period of war there is no unity between the political forces,” Klitschko said in an interview with the Funke media group, which includes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Klitschko, who has positioned himself as a supporter of former army chief General Valerii Zalujnîi, has criticized the president several times since the war broke out, including over Zalujnîi’s dismissal.

“People are asking why we weren’t better prepared for this war, why Zelenski denied until the last moment that it would come to this,” Klitschko recently said in an interview with Swiss media in February.

Asked now by German journalists if he had met with Zelenski in the meantime to ease tensions between him and the head of state, Klitschko said he had tried to do so “dozens of times since the beginning of the war” because “a lot depends on the capital “.

“But, unfortunately, I didn’t have the opportunity to meet Zelenskiy in person. He probably has other things to do,” he pointed out. Klitschko was elected mayor of Kyiv in 2014, while Zelenskiy became president of Ukraine in 2019. Both politicians ran from political formations centered around them.

Klitschko, who is believed to have presidential ambitions, also accused the Ukrainian government of doing too little to tackle widespread corruption in the country.

Vitali Klitschko has alleged that he was threatened under cover by an official in Zelenski’s office

In August 2022, Klitschko had publicly alleged that he had been threatened by an official in Zelenski’s presidential office, without naming the person who made the threat.

The former professional boxer said this happened after he signed an open letter demanding the return of Ukrainian citizenship to Gennady Korban, a businessman who served as the head of territorial defense in the Dnipropetrovsk region. On July 22, 2022, Korban was denied entry to Ukraine and his passport was confiscated at the border due to the revocation of citizenship by presidential decree.

Thousands of Ukrainians, including over 100 public figures and politicians, signed the open letter calling for the measure to be reversed. In total, it collected 112 pages of signatures.

“I’m going to tell you a secret. After I signed the letter we had a conversation with a hint: ‘You are so proactive now that I haven’t taken your German citizenship away yet’. I replied: ‘I will be very surprised if I can show my German passport and take it,'” said Klitschko in an interview given to the Ukrainian site Babel.

The mayor of Kyiv then emphasized that, although he lived a good part of his life in Germany and the United States, he does not hold a passport other than the Ukrainian one. “And I had every opportunity to receive the citizenship of these countries, I even had offers to do so, but for what? I was and remain a citizen of Ukraine,” he said.

Asked by journalists if the message he refers to was sent to him by the office of President Volodymyr Zelenski, Klitschko answered ironically:

“From where else? From the housing fund office?”.

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