The Berlin Senate Chancellery announces a video link between Mayor Giffey and Vitali Klitschko. But the conversation only lasted half an hour, then it was cut short. The man looks like the mayor of Kyiv, but he’s not.
Berlin’s governing mayor, Franziska Giffey, prematurely ended a phone call in which she was supposed to speak to Vitali Klitschko. The person on the other end of the line was not the mayor of Kiev.
“The course of the conversation and the setting of the topic have caused distrust on the Berlin side,” wrote the Senate Chancellery on Twitter. Accordingly, the suspicion arose that the interlocutor was not Klitschko. This suspicion was later confirmed by the Ukrainian ambassador Andriy Melnyk.
On its website, the Senate Chancellery had announced the conversation with Klitschko as a video conference call for 5 p.m. As the “Tagesspiegel” reported, the conversation lasted half an hour before it was broken off. According to Senate circles, the phone call had been planned for a longer time. The man on the screen looked like the real Klitschko.
A spokeswoman told the “Tagesspiegel” that the man had inquired about the situation in Berlin and about the care of the refugees in the first quarter of an hour. But the questions that came afterwards would have made the participants suspicious. According to the spokeswoman, the point was that Berlin should help Ukrainian men leave the capital to fight in Ukraine. “Or the question of whether Ukrainian refugees in Germany would get social benefits by fraud,” it said. The conversation was then broken off for technical reasons.
“Unfortunately, it is part of the reality that the war is being waged with all means – including online, to undermine trust with digital methods and to discredit Ukraine’s partners and allies,” Giffey is quoted as saying on Twitter.
