National security advisor Jake Sullivan, who accompanied the president on the trip, assured that “we notified the Russians that President Biden would be traveling to Kiev.”
The United States warned Russia “hours before” President Joe Biden’s “risky” surprise trip to Kiev on Monday to avoid any possibility of conflict, a senior White House official said.
“We notified the Russians that President Biden would be traveling to Kiev. We did so a few hours before his departure in order to avoid conflict,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan, who accompanied the president on the trip, told reporters.
“Because of the sensitivity of those communications, I won’t go into detail about how they responded or what the precise nature of our message was,” he added.
Biden arrived in Kiev on Monday, in an extraordinary first visit to Ukraine since Russian troops invaded the country on February 24, 2022.
The trip was organized under conditions of strict secrecy.
Biden departed Andrews Air Force Base in the early hours of Sunday morning. However, the White House said it cannot yet disclose how Biden arrived in the besieged Ukrainian capital.
“We are withholding some details of transportation modes and other logistical specifics until the trip is fully finalized,” communications director Kate Bedingfield said.
Sullivan said the visit “required an operational and logistical security effort by professionals across the U.S. government to take on something inherently risky and make it have a manageable level of risk.”
“Of course, there was still risk and there is still risk in something like this,” he said, but he said that “President Biden felt it was important to make this trip.”
Only two journalists were allowed to accompany the president.
After handing over their communication devices, the journalists were informed that they were on the Air Force One presidential plane only 15 minutes before it took off.
It was the first visit by a U.S. president to Ukraine since 2008.