Saturday evening at 19:00. local time, president Joe Biden he dined with his wife at the Red Hen restaurant, one of the best in Washington, because they did not have the opportunity to celebrate Valentine’s Day. They ate rigatoni with sausage and returned to White House. The next time he was seen in public 36 hours later, when he left the Mikhailovsky Cathedral in Kyiv with the howling of sirens, recalling the danger and the cause of death. his visit to Ukraine.

The U.S. president’s trip in the strictest secrecy and with a weight of history on Joe Biden’s shoulders required months of planning by a small circle of top advisers who saw the symbolic value of a visit to the Ukrainian capital on the first anniversary of the start of the war. war. . The White House had to take extremely harsh measures to keep Biden’s plans under wraps. He and his associates had long pushed for the trip to be canceled due to the volatile nature of the mission. The task of sending the president into a war zone where the US does not control airspace was titanic in itself. The decision was made Friday night in the Oval Office, where Biden gave the go-ahead. On Sunday, reporters were not told that Biden was not in Washington. In fact, according to official information, he allegedly leaves for Poland on Monday night.

C-32 that originally delivered it to Poland took off from Joint Base Andrews and was carrying several top advisers, two journalists, Sabrina Siddiqui from Wall Street Journal and Ivan Vucci from Associated Press and a photographer who was banned from bringing electronic devices. The journalists were sworn to secrecy and received detailed instructions in an email with the conspiracy heading “Instructions for arriving at the golf tournament.”

With a short refueling at an American base in Germany, the flight continued to Poland. The US President landed in Rzeszow, and from there he and his entourage boarded a train to Kyiv, a 10-hour train journey. “Since the train traveled through Ukrainian soil for a long night, the view from the window was limited by darkness. Only some lampposts or the shadows of houses were vaguely visible in the distance.

But even those who saw the train passing by could not guess who was inside,” the description reads. The newspaper “New York Times. Ahead of the visit to Ukraine, Biden was presented with a number of alternatives, but he initially said that only Kyiv made sense in terms of symbolism. If he was going to Ukraine, he wanted to go to Kyiv. “It was a risk he was willing to take,” said Kate Bedingfield, director of public relations for the White House.