US President Joe Biden arrives in Kyiv for a visit ahead of one year anniversary of Russian invasion
ADVERTISEMENTUS 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 at met with Zelenskyy at Mariinsky Palace to announce an additional half billion dollars (€465 million) on top of the more than $50 billion (€46.8 billion) already provided -- including shells for howitzers, anti-tank missiles, air surveillance radars and other aid but no new advanced weaponry.
Ukraine has also been pushing for battlefield systems that would allow its forces to strike Russian targets that have been moved back from frontline areas, out of the range of HIMARS missiles that have already been delivered. 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.
"Our negotiations were very fruitful,” Zelenskyy added.
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.
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 US and allied support for providing weaponry and direct economic assistance has started to soften.
For Zelenskyy, the symbolism of having the US president stand side by side with him on Ukrainian land as the anniversary nears is no small thing as he prods American and European allies to provide more advanced weaponry and to step up the pace of delivery.
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 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 two wreaths and held a moment of silence at the Wall of Remembrance honoring Ukrainian soldiers killed since 2014, the year Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and Russian-backed fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine.
Though Western surface-to-air missile systems have bolstered Ukraine’s defensives, the visit marked the rare occasion where a US president has traveled to a conflict zone where the US or its allies did not have control over the airspace.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the US had given advance notice of the trip to Moscow to avoid any miscalculation that could bring the two nuclear-armed nations into direct conflict.
The US military does not have a presence in Ukraine other than a small detachment of Marines guarding the embassy in Kyiv, making Biden’s visit more complicated than other recent visits by prior American leaders to war zones.
Speculation has been building for weeks that Biden would pay a visit to Ukraine around the 24 February of the Russian invasion. But the White House repeatedly had said that no presidential trip to Ukraine was planned, even after the Poland visit was announced earlier this month.
At the White House, planning for Biden’s visit to Kyiv was tightly held -- with a relatively small group of aides briefed on the plans -- because of security concerns.
Biden quietly departed from Joint Base Andrews near Washington in the early hours of Sunday morning, making a stop at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, before making his way into Ukraine.
This is Biden’s first visit to a war zone as president. His recent predecessors, Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, made surprise visits to Afghanistan and Iraq during their presidencies to meet with US troops and those countries’ leaders.