Meeting with Olena Selenska
First Lady Jill Biden on a spontaneous visit to Ukraine
05/08/2022 4:53 p.m
US President Joe Biden has so far avoided going to Kyiv. His wife has now traveled to Ukraine at short notice for this purpose. She talks to refugees and meets the wife of the Ukrainian President, Olena Selenska. The US wants to reopen its embassy in Kyiv in the next few weeks.
US First Lady Jill Biden made a surprise visit to Ukraine. Traveling US journalists reported that the First Lady entered Ukraine from Slovakia and stayed there for almost two hours. In the city of Ushorod she met with refugees. She also met the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Olena Zelenska. Biden and Selenska had a bilateral conversation for about an hour.
According to journalists traveling with him, Jill Biden said: “I wanted to come for Mother’s Day. I thought it was important to show the Ukrainian people that this war had to stop.” The US stands with Ukraine. Selenska thanked Biden for the “brave” visit and said through a translator: “Because we understand what it means for the First Lady of the USA to come here during a war, where military action is taking place every day, where every day today the air sirens are sounding.”
In Slovakia, Biden had previously visited the border crossing to Ukraine in Vysne Nemecke with Prime Minister Eduard Heger. In the morning, the First Lady visited a reception center run by the city in Kosice in the east of the country. Then she was in a primary school, where Ukrainian women and children are housed. A meeting with Slovak President Zuzana Caputova is scheduled for Monday.
Biden is currently completing a multi-day tour of neighboring countries to Ukraine, which has been affected by the Russian war of aggression. Biden was a guest in Romania on Friday and Saturday. There she also visited US troops stationed in the NATO country. Meanwhile, the US State Department announced that it would send a team of diplomats to Kyiv to restart the US embassy in the coming weeks.