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Warsaw, Poland (Trends Wide) — Around 7 pm ET on Saturday night, President Joe Biden was in Washington on a Valentine’s Day date, tucking into rigatoni with fennel sausage ragout before returning with his wife to the White House.
The next time he was seen in public was 36 hours later, leaving Kyiv’s St. Michael’s Cathedral on a bright wintry day as air raid sirens wailed as reminders of both the risks and the reasons for visiting Ukraine, which was enters its second year of war.
Biden’s trip, shrouded in secrecy and steeped in history, was the result of months of planning by a handful of his top advisers, who long recognized the symbolic importance of visiting the Ukrainian capital a year after Russia tried to capture it. .
“One year later, Kyiv is still standing,” Biden declared on Monday. “And Ukraine is still standing. Democracy is still standing.”
It was more than tokenism, however, that led Biden to bear the significant risk of visiting an active war zone without significant US military assets on the ground.
In closed-door talks at the Mariinsky Palace on Monday, Biden sought to engage in a detailed and urgent discussion with President Volodymyr Zelensky over the next phase of the war, which US officials say has reached a critical point.
The progress of the war in the coming months will depend to a large extent on the continued support of the United States, which Biden promised this Monday would be unremitting. If his message was meant to reassure Ukrainians, he was also meant to remind Americans that the stakes of the conflict go far beyond Ukraine’s borders.
A secret until the last minute
“This goes way beyond Ukraine. It’s about freedom of democracy in Europe, it’s about freedom and democracy in general,” he said, wearing his blue and yellow tie as a nod to his Ukrainian hosts.
Keeping Biden’s plans secret required extraordinary measures on the part of the White House. In the weeks leading up to Biden’s trip, both he and his top aides repeatedly ruled out the possibility of a trip to Ukraine. Every effort was made to maintain that stance in the hour before Biden’s surprise arrival in Kyiv.
This was partly due to the fluid nature of the trip itself. Although the small circle of White House officials involved in the planning were confident that it was a feasible undertaking, the reality of sending a president to a war zone where the United States had no control over the airspace was daunting. daunting.
The final decision was made in a meeting in the Oval Office on Friday night, when Biden gave the final green light. Once the trip began, US officials took steps to notify Moscow of his plans, an attempt at “conflict resolution” aimed at averting an unthinkable disaster while Biden was on the ground.
In Washington, however, the secret had to be maintained for everything to go well.
Reporters were not told Sunday that Biden was no longer in Washington. The official White House schedule, made public Sunday night, continued to indicate his departure for Poland this Monday at 7 pm ET.
His top national security spokesman denied the possibility of the president visiting Ukraine in an interview broadcast on Sunday morning.
“We’re going to continue to use our convening power, to rally the world, to rally support for Ukraine, but there are no plans for the president to visit Ukraine on this trip,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in a statement. an interview on MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart.”
But by this time, Biden had already taken off from Joint Base Andrews hours earlier, not in the usual plane that is synonymous with Air Force One, but in a smaller Air Force C-32.
On board were only a small group of senior advisers, a reporter and a photographer, whose electronic devices were removed before departure.
A 10-hour train journey through Ukraine
They would make a fuel stop at a US base in Germany before continuing the flight to Poland. As he flew east, Biden focused on planning his talks with Zelensky, hoping to use his time wisely to discuss the coming months of fighting.
Biden landed in Rzeszow, the Polish city where he stopped in March last year to visit US troops deployed near the Ukrainian border and humanitarian efforts to support Ukrainian refugees. During that visit 11 months ago, she alluded to what had become an old wish to extend her trip to Ukraine a little longer.
“I’m here in Poland to see the humanitarian crisis firsthand, and frankly part of my disappointment is that I can’t see it firsthand like I have in other places,” Biden said then. “They don’t let me, I guess understandably, cross the border and take a look at what’s going on in the Ukraine.”
This time, with a larger number of US airborne assets keeping a close eye on the Polish border, Biden could make the trip. Biden, his small contingent of aides and the Secret Service traveling with him boarded the train for Kyiv for the roughly 10-hour journey to the war-torn center of the country.
It was the culmination of a process that began months earlier, when Biden watched a parade of his foreign counterparts each make the trip to Ukraine.
They started visiting Kyiv in March 2022, when the Prime Ministers of Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic arrived by train. Then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited the country on April 9, followed by visits from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron and then- Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv on April 25 to meet with Zelensky. Even the first lady, Jill Biden, made a surprise visit on Mother’s Day last year to a small town in the far south-west of Ukraine. She met with the first lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska.
A risk that Biden “wanted to take”
In the planning phase of this trip, Biden was presented with several options, but he decided that only the capital, Kyiv, made sense as a meeting place, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The president never seriously considered other places: if he was going to go to Ukraine, he wanted to go to Kyiv.
When Biden was briefed over several months about planning a possible visit, the person said that Biden only once raised concerns about the risk of a visit to Ukraine, but was referring to the extent to which his visit could jeopardize danger to others, rather than to your own safety. Other officials were very concerned about Biden’s own safety and prepared a series of security contingency plans for the trip.
“It was a risk that Joe Biden wanted to take,” White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said.
“It’s important to him to show up, even when it’s difficult, and he instructed his team to do it, no matter how difficult the logistics were.”
On Monday, after the trip concluded, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan declined to say whether Biden had to overrule Secret Service or military officials to proceed with the trip.
“He received a comprehensive presentation of a very good and very effective operational security plan. He listened to that presentation, was satisfied that the risk was manageable, and ultimately made the decision (to go),” Sullivan said.
— Jeremy Diamond contributed reporting.
