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The White House warned the Kremlin before President Joe Biden made his surprise trip to kyiv on Monday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.
‘We notified the Russians that President Biden would travel to kyiv. We did it a few hours before his departure in order to avoid conflict,” Sullivan told reporters in a call Monday after Biden left the Ukrainian capital.
Biden secretly left Washington at 4:15 a.m. Sunday, flew to Poland and then took a 10-hour train ride so he could be with Ukrainian President Zelensky four days before the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion.
Sullivan did not elaborate on what the United States specifically told the Russians.
“And due to the sensitive nature of those communications, I won’t go into how they responded or what the precise nature of our message was, but I can confirm that we did provide that notification,” he said on the call.
President Joe Biden (center) poses for a photo with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (right) and Olena Zelenska (left) in front of the Mariinsky Palace in Kiev, Ukraine, on Monday.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that the Kremlin was informed of Biden’s trips to kyiv prior to his arrival. Russian President Vladimir Putin is pictured on Thursday.
President Joe Biden (left) walks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (right) outside the gold-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral during Monday’s surprise trip to kyiv.
The White House also kept mum on Biden’s means of travel.
The New York Times reported that Biden crossed the border by train.
Beyond that, White House officials wouldn’t even say what kind of plane the president flew to Europe.
Air Force One is the call sign of the president’s plane, so it doesn’t specifically mean the president traveled on the recognizable blue and white Boeing 747s he would normally take on a trip abroad.
“We’re not going to get into any real detail about the various elements of the trip and the modalities and modes of transportation and the like until we basically get the green light from the security folks to be able to share all of that,” Sullivan said. .
“We’ll share it, but we just want to make sure we do it once we feel it’s operationally safe to do it,” he added.
A US military plane was parked at the Warsaw airport on Sunday at lunchtime.
President Joe Biden (left) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (right) at the Mariinsky Palace during the trip on Monday.
President Joe Biden (left) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (right) walk past the Saint Mikhailovsky Cathedral in kyiv on Monday.
President Joe Biden (left) signs a guest book at the Mariinsky Palace on Monday as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (right) looks on
Even within the ranks of the US government, the trip was a closely guarded secret.
Those involved in the planning came from the White House, the office of the chief of staff, the National Security Council, the White House Military Office, the Pentagon, the Secret Service and the intelligence community.
“Only a handful of people in each of these buildings were involved in operational security planning,” Deputy Homeland Security Adviser Jonathan Finer told reporters.
The journey was made more difficult with no US military personnel on the ground in Ukraine and only a small number of US embassy personnel.
“The United States also has a very small embassy footprint compared to the massive operations in Afghanistan and Iraq during the presidents’ visits to those locations during the war,” Finer said.
In addition, the president traveled with an “extremely small” group, Finer said, made up of a handful of his closest aides, including Sullivan, a small medical team, security and two reporters.
The two reporters, a newspaper reporter and a photographer, had their phones taken away as they were leaving.
The rest of Biden’s press group, which usually consists of around a dozen journalists, stayed in Washington.
For days, the White House had said publicly that the Ukraine war anniversary trip would be strictly to Warsaw, Poland, where the president is scheduled to meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda and the leaders of the Nine Nations. from Bucharest.
That part of the trip is expected to continue as planned.