Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib confirmed on Tuesday her intention to visit Ukraine when conditions allow it.
“We are going to prepare this trip, but it cannot be improvised. The timing has to be right,” she said in an interview with Belga News Agency on the sidelines of her working visit to the UN headquarters in New York, venue since Sunday of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Review Conference.
The new Foreign Minister deemed it “regrettable, in the current international context, that a national political controversy had been stirred up by around a trip she made, as a journalist, to Crimea in 2021, and which she said she had “never hidden”.
“Had I known at the time that I would be a minister in the following year, perhaps I would have acted differently,” she noted.
She confirmed that since the information was released last week regarding her trip to Crimea as a journalist, discussions have taken place at the highest level between Belgium and Ukraine. “We have reiterated our mutual trust,” she said.
