Russia’s permanent representative sparked outrage among international organizations in Vienna with a Twitter post that has since been deleted. “No mercy for the Ukrainian people,” Mikhail Ulyanov said in a speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The request to speak now has direct consequences for the diplomat: Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg (ÖVP) now quotes him.
Ulyanov, who later deleted his English tweet, felt misunderstood. In a phone call to the APA, he said he was “of course not” advocating genocide against the Ukrainians. “If you read what I have written on Twitter in recent years, you will not find anything contemptuous about the Ukrainian people,” the diplomat said.
Maybe he should have written a question mark instead of an exclamation mark, he thought. “But I reacted emotionally to Zelenskyi’s message – again only weapons, no diplomacy,” he explained.
Schallenberg: ‘Not to be put into perspective’
However, this explanation is not enough for the Minister of Foreign Affairs. “We are outraged by the inhumane statements of the Russian Permanent Representative and his attempts to put into perspective what cannot be put into perspective,” Schallenberg told krone.at.
For this reason, Ulyanov was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before Sunday: “We stand for freedom of expression. But we are also free to act decisively against such incendiary statements,” Schallenberg said.
Constant fuss about statements
Ulyanov, who recently worked mainly as a Russian negotiator on the nuclear talks with Iran in Vienna, is not the first Russian diplomat in Vienna whose activities on social networks have sparked discussions. Konstantin Gawrilow, responsible for the disarmament negotiations in Vienna, also tweeted a NEOS parliamentary question to Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg (ÖVP) in mid-August.
The senior Russian diplomat previously shared a tweet in which a self-proclaimed Stalinist called for the reintroduction of Stalinist state terror in Russia. However, Gavrilov’s personal attitude to this requirement remained unclear.
Source: Krone
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