After a meeting in Slovakia, a Kremlin cultural representative traveled to Vienna earlier this week. Appointments with representatives of official Austria were apparently canceled at the last minute, which Russia strongly criticizes. The Foreign Ministry has not yet responded to whether the Kremlin representative has received a visa.
The Russian President’s Special Representative for International Cultural Cooperation, Mikhail Schwydkoy, who has been in office since 2008, was in Vienna early this week, where he said he wanted to meet representatives of official Austria. However, all meetings were canceled at the last minute, the senior Kremlin bureaucrat and former culture minister told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti and TASS on Monday.
The official not affected by European sanctions is likely the highest-ranking Kremlin envoy to come to Austria since Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine began on February 24, 2022.
Speech on the Brahmsplatz
As part of his “official visit” to Austria, Schwydkoy met for the first time on Monday morning with about twenty members of the Russian community at the cultural institute on Brahmsplatz in Vienna. According to those present, he emphasized in a short speech that there would be no change in the political course in Moscow after Sunday’s presidential elections.
Apply for subsidies
As a result, representatives of Russian cultural and educational projects in Austria addressed the Kremlin bureaucrat for almost two hours with specific concerns and asked for support and subsidies. The president’s representative made remarks in a small notebook, said one of the observers invited on Tuesday to the meeting in the first days of March.
“passing balls”
“There were now preliminary, very preliminary agreements on meetings with colleagues representing the official structures of Austria, but unfortunately everyone canceled at the last minute,” Shvydkoy told the RIA Novosti news agency afterwards. He also spoke of a recent “ball-passing” at the level of Austrian government offices, which he did not specify further. Given the role that Russia plays in Austria’s history and the great importance of cultural and educational contacts with Austria, canceling the meetings is a “short-sighted position”. No matter how difficult the present is, it is still necessary to think about the future, the Russian explained.
At the same time, the Special Representative emphasized to news agencies that the new Slovak Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová had lifted a ban on cooperation with Russian cultural institutions. A spokesman for the Russian embassy in Austria said on Tuesday that Schwydkoj had traveled from Vienna to Bratislava, according to his information.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs remains tight-lipped
“There were no agreements with representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” a spokeswoman for the Austrian Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday evening. She left unanswered the question of whether the ministry was aware of planned and ultimately canceled meetings of Kremlin representatives. However, she refused to explicitly answer the question of whether Schwydkoj had traveled to Vienna on an Austrian Schengen visa: “Information about individual administrative procedures, as well as visa procedures, is subject to data protection rules.”
“We can rule out that someone from the art and culture section has such a meeting in mind,” State Secretary Andrea Mayer of Art and Culture emphasized on Wednesday.
Close contacts with Austria
During his many years as Special Representative of the Russian President for International Cultural Cooperation, former Minister of Culture and television producer Schwydkoj repeatedly had close contacts with Austria. For example, in June 2019, he spoke publicly in St. Petersburg with the general director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Sabine Haag, the co-chair of the Austrian-Russian Sochi Dialogue, which will be suspended in 2022, Christoph Leitl, and the then head of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow, Simon Mraz. Haag and Mraz announced that they had not met the Kremlin bureaucrat in Vienna.
Source: Krone
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