US President Joe Biden was intently focused on discussing the coming months of fighting when he sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Monday, according to White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
Their talks come at what Sullivan called a “critical juncture” in the war, as Russia prepares for a spring offensive and as Ukraine hopes to retake territory seized over the past 12 months.
The US has hoped to help Ukraine consolidate its battlefield gains, sending steady shipments of arms and ammunition. But what lies ahead remains uncertain, as Russia appears to be regrouping.
As Biden flew from Washington to Europe, he was intent on strategizing on how to make the most of his conversation with Zelensky.
“The President was very focused on making sure that he made the most of his time on the ground, which he knew was going to be limited,” Sullivan said. “So he was quite focused on how he was going to approach his conversation with President Zelensky and in part how the two of them were really going to look out over the course of 2023 and try to come to a common understanding of what the objectives are.”
In their talks, the two leaders “spent time talking about the coming months in terms of the battlefield and what Ukraine need capabilities to be able to succeed on the battlefield,” Sullivan said.
“They talked about Ukraine’s needs in terms of energy, infrastructure, economic support humanitarian needs. And they also talked about the political side of this,” he said.
Biden was “excited” as made his surprise trip to Ukraine on Monday, a journey Sullivan described as “filled with real anticipation that this was an important moment.”
Sullivan said Biden “wanted to do it, characteristically, by delving into the details by knowing the specifics and by being sure that he was going to make the most of every moment.”
Asked if Biden had to overrule anyone on his security team to make the trip, Sullivan declined to get into details of the discussions but said that “the president proceeded with the confidence that his security team was able to bring risk to a manageable level.”
White House officials also would not go into details about the logistics of the president’s trip, saying that more details would come once they “got the green light from the security folks.”
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