As far as the world was concerned, President Biden was home for the evening in Washington after a date night. But he was aboard a train rumbling across the Ukrainian countryside on a secret mission to visit Kyiv.
President Joe Biden, right, is escorted by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine as he visits Kyiv, Ukraine’s embattled capital, Feb. 20, 2023.
For much of the past year, in fact, most of the people around the president resisted any urge to go, on the assumption that it was too risky. But nearly a year after the Russian invasion, with Ukrainian troops faring far better than anyone expected at the start and other U.S. and European leaders having made the trip, Biden and his team gambled that he could get in and out safely.
Finally, the decision came to a head Friday, when Biden gathered with a handful of top advisers in the Oval Office and consulted with others by phone. He opted to go. The two-person journalism pool was a radical departure from even other security-sensitive presidential trips, when the usual complement of 13 reporters and photographers was taken. But it would not be the only unusual feature of the trip.
Biden was put in a motorcade with roughly 20 cars and driven without sirens for about an hour along a mostly empty highway to the small city of Przemyśl and taken to the train station where many thousands of refugees have arrived from Ukraine over the past year. Arriving at 9:15 p.m., the travelers found few people there and the stalls closed.
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