House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a visit of fellow lawmakers to Ukraine over the weekend, relaying a message of solidarity while an evacuation of the devastated city of Mariupol got underway.
Pelosi, of California, and six other Democratic members of Congress met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for about three hours late Saturday on a surprise trip that was not revealed until the following day.
“Our commitment is to be there for you until the fight is done,” Pelosi told Zelenskyy, according to a video of the meeting in Kyiv released by his office. “We are on a frontier of freedom and your fight is a fight for everyone. Thank you for your fight for freedom.”
“You all are welcome,” Zelenskyy responded.
After the high-level meeting, Pelosi and the delegation traveled to neighboring Poland.
“We were proud to convey to him the message of unity from the Congress of the United States, a message of appreciation from the American people for his leadership and admiration for the people of Ukraine for their courage,” Pelosi said, CNBC reported.
President Biden is asking Congress to authorize $33 billion in aid for Ukraine, which already has gotten billions of dollars in humanitarian and military support from the U.S. since Russia launched its invasion more than two months ago.
New York’s Rep. Gregory Meeks was part of Pelosi’s delegation.
“We continue to be inspired by the Ukrainian people and their strength in the face of unfathomable challenges,” the Queens pol, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on Twitter.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Ukraine last month.
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Since Russia launched its unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, the U.S. has sent about $14 billion in aid, according to NPR.
The assistance has included crucial weaponry, but the U.S. and its NATO allies have stopped short of sending troops.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said Sunday the violence in Ukraine was “not necessarily” a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia.
“If Russia cannot defeat Ukraine with a much larger army, with greater sophisticated weaponry and a much-vaunted military, then it has to think about creating acts of aggression against any other country in Europe or anyplace else,” Menendez, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“We don’t want to see Russia go into Moldova [or] … a NATO country and Poland or Lithuania, or any other such country,” he said.
Denmark and Sweden on Sunday accused Russia of violating their airspace.
A Russian spy plane was in Danish space “for a very brief moment,” authorities told Agence-France Presse.
Both Denmark, which is a NATO member, and Sweden, which is considering joining the alliance, said they would summon Russian ambassadors to discuss the incident, according to the BBC.
Meanwhile, evacuation efforts started at the blockaded southeastern city of Mariupol.
An estimated 100,000 Ukrainians were believed to be trapped in the Russian-controlled city, with about 2,000 troops and 1,000 civilians taking shelter at a steelworks plant.
About 100 people in the first group of evacuees managed to escape the grim conditions as of Sunday morning, Zelenskyy tweeted.
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“Grateful to our team!” he wrote. “Now they, together with #UN, are working on the evacuation of other civilians from the plant.”
Since Russian forces retreated from the area around Kyiv last month, they’ve been concentrating on eastern Ukraine. Shelling was reported along the border over the weekend.
But in northeastern Kharkiv — one of the first targets in Russia’s invasion — Ukrainian soldiers recaptured four settlements, a military official told the BBC.
“In Kutuzovka, about 100 people, most of them elderly and children, lived in cold basements for two months without light, gas and food supplies,” regional governor Oleg Sinegubov was quoted as saying. “Today our defenders were greeted with tears.”
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Across the country, in western Lviv, actress Angelina Jolie visited displaced people on Saturday, according to Maksym Kozytskyy, Lviv’s regional governor.
She met with children wounded in Russia’s brutal strike in April on the Kramatorsk railway station and visited a boarding school, said Kozytskyy.
Jolie, a United Nations special envoy for refugees, “was very moved by [the children’s] stories,” Kozytskyy wrote on the Telegram messaging service. “One girl was even able to privately tell Ms. Jolie about a dream she’d had.”
With News Wire Services
