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Netanyahu snubs Zelensky, declines invitation to visit Ukraine

Ukrainian leader disregards millions of dollars in humanitarian aid provided by Israel, slams premier for not traveling to war-torn Kyiv.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky said that he had invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit Kyiv and complained that the premier had not traveled to the embattled eastern European country in a statement to Hebrew-language media on Wednesday.

“Mr. Netanyahu has been invited to Kyiv… I invited the other two prime ministers who used to be before Mr. Netanyahu to Ukraine,” Zelensky said, referring to Naftali Bennett, who served in the role for less than a year, and interim prime minister Yair Lapid who was in office for about six months.

“So far, the prime ministers are different, but the result is the same,” Zelensky told Kan News via an interpreter.

Zelensky didn’t stop at slamming Israel’s heads of state for failing to travel to Ukraine; he repeated his criticism regarding Jerusalem choosing not to provide weapons to the country.

“We asked in the beginning of the war, the result is just the same as with the prime ministers,” he said. Months have passed with no outcome, unfortunately.”

The Ukrainian president failed to mention that Israel spent millions of dollars providing humanitarian aid to the country, including opening a state-of-the-art field hospital in the country to provide emergency medical care to soldiers and civilians.

Zelensky also did not reference the Jewish state regularly flying wounded Ukrainian soldiers to Israel in order to provide them free medical care, physical therapy, and prostheses.

Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine Michael Brodsky recently noted that Ukraine votes in favor of anti-Israel resolutions in the United Nations “90 percent” of the time, emphasizing that Kyiv has long demonstrated a lack of diplomatic support for Jerusalem.

In a speech last year to the Knesset, Zelesnky compared the Russian invasion of Ukraine with the Holocaust – an assertion which miffed many Israeli lawmakers and for which he later offered a lukewarm apology.

Israel recently summoned the Ukrainian Ambassador to Israel for a dressing down, after he made scathing remarks regarding Israel’s neutral stance on the conflict.