Many in his administration and the Pentagon did not know about the visit of US President Joe Biden to Kyiv. The details of the preparation of the head of the White House in the Ukrainian capital were revealed on February 20 by the agency Bloomberg.
Sources of the publication said that the final decision on the trip was made on February 17 after a meeting in the Oval Office. The next day, Biden stayed in Washington, in defiance of his weekend habit at his home in Delaware.
On February 18, the President and his wife, Jill, attended mass on the campus of Georgetown University, viewed the First Ladies exhibit at the National Museum of American History, and dined at Red Hen Restaurant. The next day, at 4 am, Biden flew to the Ramstein base in Germany, then headed for Polish Rzeszow, after which the president traveled by train to Kyiv.
To maintain secrecy, Biden’s delegation was reduced to his closest aides, a small medical team, a Wall Street Journal journalist, an Associated Press photographer, and bodyguards. In Poland, Biden was joined by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and other senior White House officials.
The journalists were made to promise to keep the visit secret, they received information about the trip from a letter called “Instructions for arriving at the golf tournament.” Before the plane took off, they were required to return their phones, they received the devices back 24 hours later.
Biden arrived in Kyiv around 8 a.m. Feb. 20 and left the Ukrainian capital at about 8 p.m., heading back to Poland.
In Kyiv, Biden met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at St. Michael’s Cathedral. During the trip, the American president announced a new $500 million military aid package that could include howitzers and Javelin systems. Officially, it will be announced later, on February 21. In addition, Biden called an extremely high price for Ukraine in the conflict with Russia.
At the same time, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reacted to Biden’s visit to Kyiv and his meeting with Ukrainian leader Zelensky. She mentioned ex-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili and advised not to forget “the fate of American projects.”
On January 22, a former adviser to the head of the Pentagon, retired US Army Colonel Douglas McGregor, said that Biden could stop the conflict in Ukraine with just one call, since the White House, in fact, is sponsoring him. According to McGregor, the President of Ukraine is not an independent figure. McGregor pointed out that Washington has invested so much money in Kyiv that it already feels like an American state, not an independent state.
Western countries have stepped up military and financial support for Ukraine against the backdrop of Russia’s special operation to protect Donbass, which the Russian authorities announced amid the aggravation of the situation in the region due to Ukrainian shelling.
