The United States promised this Saturday to increase its security, economic and humanitarian support to Ukraine, during a meeting with Ukrainian ministers in Warsaw in which President Joe Biden participated.
This was indicated by the US State Department in a statement after the meeting between Ukrainian officials and the US Secretaries of State and Defense, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin.
“Secretaries Blinken and Austin promised to continue their support to meet humanitarian, security, and economic needs as President (Russian Vladimir) Putin’s full-scale invasion enters its second month,” the official note said.
The meeting lasted more than an hour and a half and in its final stretch, it was attended by Biden, who participated for 40 minutes in what marked his first meeting with a Ukrainian official since the beginning of the Russian invasion.
Biden and his advisers “discussed future efforts to help Ukraine defend its territory” during the meeting with Ukrainian Foreign and Defense Ministers Dmitro Kuleba and Oleksii Reznikov, the White House said in another statement.
The president updated the ministers on the summits in which he participated on Thursday in Brussels, including NATO, and stressed that the United States already provides Ukraine with “significant military and humanitarian assistance,” according to the note.
Ukraine has asked Washington and its allies to go further in helping the country and provide them with combat aircraft, in addition to establishing a no-fly zone over Ukrainian territory, something that Biden has steadfastly refused, considering that it would lead to a World War.
Biden also detailed during the meeting the measures he is taking to “hold President Putin accountable for Russia’s brutal aggression,” including the new sanctions on Russian oligarchs, politicians, and defense companies that he announced Thursday in Brussels, the press said. White House.
The press had access to the beginning of the meeting and was able to listen to how Kuleba told Biden that since the war began, he has learned to “sleep in any circumstance”, which allowed him to rest during the long journey from Kiev to Warsaw, where He traveled by train and by car.
Biden replied that he can also sleep on the trains, thanks to the fact that when he was a senator, he took them daily to move from the US capital to the state where he lived, Delaware.
Kuleba assured in a tweet that the meeting with this large US delegation would allow “searching for practical solutions in the political and defense spheres, to strengthen Ukraine’s ability to fight against Russian aggression.”
For his part, Reznikov stated on his official Twitter account that both ministers will be present at the speech on the war in Ukraine that Biden will give this Saturday at 06:00 in the afternoon at the Royal Palace in Warsaw.
Biden later met with Polish President Andrzej Duda before visiting the PGE Narodowy soccer stadium, converted into a refugee center to care for some of the more than 2.17 million who have fled to Poland since the war began.