US president Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday, shoring up support for his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy days before the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The stopover, which comes ahead of Biden’s preannounced trip this week to Poland’s capital Warsaw, marks the first time the US leader has visited Kyiv since taking over as president. He visited multiple times while serving as vice-president in the Obama administration.
Videos posted on Ukrainian social media including by Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser at Ukraine’s interior ministry, showed Biden and Zelenskyy strolling outside a golden-domed church in downtown Kyiv as air raid sirens went off in Kyiv and much of the country.
“President Biden is in Kyiv,” Gerashchenko wrote.
This is a developing story.
