Kyiv: President Joe Biden made an unannounced visit Monday to Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a gesture of solidarity that comes days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of the country.Biden delivered remarks and met with Zelensky at Mariinsky Palace to announce an additional half-billion dollars in U.S. assistance and to reassure Ukraine of American and allied support as the conflict continues.
The U.S. leader recalled the fears nearly a year ago that Russia’s invasion forces might quickly take the Ukrainian capital. “One year later, Kyiv stands,” Biden said, jamming his finger for emphasis on his stand decorated with the U.S. and Ukrainian flags. “Ukraine stands. Democracy stands. The Americans stand with you and the world stands with you.”The Ukraine visit comes at a crucial moment in the war as Biden looks to keep allies unified in their support for Ukraine as the war is expected to intensify with both sides preparing for spring offensives. Zelenskyy is pressing allies to speed up delivery of pledged weapon systems and is calling on the West to deliver fighter jets to Ukraine — something that Biden to date has declined to do.
Zelenskyy said he and Biden spoke about “long range weapons and the weapons that may still be supplied to Ukraine even though it wasn’t supplied before.” But he did not detail any new commitments.
Biden’s mission with his visit to Kyiv — and then Warsaw — is to underscore that the United States is prepared to stick with Ukraine “as long as it takes” to repel Russian forces even as public opinion polling suggests that U.S. and allied support for providing weaponry and direct economic assistance has started to soften. For Zelenskyy, the symbolism of having the U.S. president stand side by side with him on Ukrainian land as the anniversary nears is no small thing as he prods the U.S. and European allies to provide more advanced weaponry and to step up the pace of delivery.
“I thought it was critical that there not be any doubt, none whatsoever, about U.S. support for Ukraine in the war,” Biden said.
The visit also gives Biden an opportunity to get a firsthand look at the devastation the Russian invasion has caused on Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainian troops and civilians have been killed, millions of refugees have fled the war, and Ukraine has suffered tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure damage.The trip also marks an act of defiance against Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had hoped his military would swiftly overrun Kyiv within days. A year later, the Ukrainian capital stands and a semblance of normalcy has returned to the city as the fighting has concentrated in the country’s east, punctuated by cruise missile and drone attacks against military and civilian infrastructure.
Biden, a Democrat, also got a short firsthand taste of the terror that Ukrainians have lived with for close to a year, as air raids sirens howled over the capital just as he and Zelenskyy were exiting the gold-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral, which they visited together. Looking solemn, they continued unperturbed as they laid a wreath and held a moment of silence at the Wall of Remembrance honoring Ukrainian soldiers killed since 2014.Though Western surface-to-air missile systems have bolstered Ukraine’s defensives, the visit marked the rare occasion where a U.S. president has traveled to a conflict zone where the U.S. or its allies did not have control over the airspace. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the U.S. had given advance notice of the trip to Moscow to avoid any miscalculation that could bring the two nuclear-armed nations into direct conflict.
