US President Joe Biden visited Kiev for a few hours on Monday.
Washington:
Perhaps the most intensely scrutinized man on the planet, President Joe Biden left the world’s media and the Washington rumor mill completely in the dark as he made his secret trip to wartime Kiev.
Biden looked relaxed as he appeared in the Ukrainian capital on Monday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky. But it took an extraordinary military, diplomatic and media choreography to get him there.
At the heart of the mission was a massive misdirection.
Biden had long been scheduled to fly to Poland late Monday to mark the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Aboard the modified Boeing 747 that they use as Air Force One on long trips, the 13-member traveling media crew, assistants and security team were ready.
So along with everything else for what was already promising to be a highly symbolic trip, Biden made a public show throughout the rest weekend.
On Saturday, he attended afternoon church, followed by a tour of the National Museum of American History with First Lady Jill Biden, then dinner at a casual restaurant called the Red Hen.
sunday? The White House declared a day of rest with nothing on its schedule.
Or so the world — including the hundreds of reporters assigned to cover the White House — has been led to believe.
By then, Biden, 80, a handful of senior aides and just two reporters, were already on their way to Kiev, arriving early Monday morning.
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How exactly he made the trip is still a mystery.
A host of European leaders have traveled from Poland to Kiev by train, but for a long time it was little believed that a US president, accompanied by an aide with nuclear arsenal codes, would spend hours trapped in a railcar.
Flying has its own complexities, given the daily air battles and rocket attacks in the skies over Ukraine.
It is unknown whether any US forces – air or ground – entered Ukraine to provide cover, or whether Ukrainian forces, which are in close coordination with US counterparts, secured the area.
But the White House revealed that direct contact had been made with Moscow just before Biden arrived – possibly as a stern warning.
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, “We had informed the Russians that President Biden would be traveling to Kiev. We did so a few hours before his departure for the purpose of a cease-fire.”
“Due to the sensitive nature of those communications, I will not get into how they responded or what the exact nature of our message was.”
The White House says full details will be released later, but Sullivan said the mere fact of the visit has been “historic”.
US presidents have visited threatened areas before – notably Afghanistan and Iraq during the US-led wars. However, in those cases, the presidents flew into huge bases already controlled by the US military.
Sullivan, one of the few aides accompanying Biden, said it was a “historic visit, unprecedented in modern times” to a country at war with no US troops on the ground.
Biden left Kiev under equally mysterious circumstances, according to the reporter designated to stand in for the general travel press corps. By the time Americans woke up to the news, Biden, now expected to reappear in Poland for a previously announced portion of his trip, was already tweeting:
“Kiev has captured a part of my heart.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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