Lapid, Kuleba said set to speak after reported snub by Ukrainian foreign minister

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba will speak with Foreign Minister Yair Lapid after reportedly refusing to take his Israeli counterpart’s call for nearly a week due to Israel’s position after Ukraine was invaded by Russia, the Walla news site reports.

The report says the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has told Israeli officials that the call can now go ahead.

Foreign Ministry officials indicate to Walla that the conversation will take place this evening or tomorrow.

Lapid sought to speak with Kuleba last week but was told that the Ukrainian foreign minister was busy, the Haaretz and Walla news sites reported Sunday evening. Both reports said that the two men have not spoken for over three months.

Walla quoted an unnamed Ukrainian official as saying that one of the reasons Kuleba had not gotten back to Lapid was that Israel’s top diplomat had phoned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov but had not reached out to Kuleba in the weeks leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Lapid also reportedly did not respond to an invitation to visit Kyiv, which was relayed by Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova when she visited Israel last month.

Last week, Kuleba apologized after mistakenly accusing Israel’s flag carrier El Al of allowing its customers to make payments via a Russian banking system, which would have been in violation of Western sanctions.

Israel’s relationship with Kyiv has been strained by the fact that Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has avoided directly blaming Russia for the war, although Lapid has done so on several occasions, with the latest during a visit to Romania on Sunday.

Israel has been seeking to use its unique position of having relatively good ties with both Russia and Ukraine to broker an agreement, as it also tries to walk a tightrope maintaining its ties to both countries.