…as foreign diplomats begin slow return to Kyiv
US First Lady Jill Biden is set to travel to Romania and Slovakia later this week to meet Ukrainian refugees.
She is due to spend Sunday – which is Mother’s Day in the US – with mothers and children displaced by the conflict to Slovakia, reports the BBC.
Her trip represents the latest show of support for Ukraine from high-level American representatives – following Sunday’s unannounced visit to Kyiv from Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives.
During Biden’s journey to eastern Europe, from May 5-9, she is also due to meet US service personnel and diplomats, as well as humanitarian workers and teachers.
Meanwhile, foreign embassies are slowly reopening their doors in Ukraine’s capital, as the security situation there improves.
Today Hungary became the latest country to announce that its embassy was operating out of Kyiv once again, the same day that Denmark said it too would be reopening its embassy. They follow France, which made the move two weeks ago.
The UK’s ambassador Melinda Simmons came back to Kyiv this weekend, describing her return as “an extraordinary thing”. The British embassy hasn’t reopened its doors yet but the Foreign Office says it will do so soon.
The US is yet to return its diplomats to the capital, but today American officials in Lviv said the delegation would be back in Kyiv by the end of the month.
Russian troops may have withdrawn from their positions around the Ukrainian capital but the city is still vulnerable to attacks from the air.
Last week, Moscow announced it was primed to carry out strikes in the capital and warned the presence of foreign advisers in those sites “will not necessarily be a problem to Russia deciding to take retaliatory action”.
And in a related development, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to describe Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion as the country’s “finest hour” when he address its parliament virtually on Tuesday.
Johnson is set to say that the UK Parliament met throughout World War Two, just as Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada has done through the war with Russia, and that the British people showed “such unity and resolve that we remember our time of greatest peril as our finest hour”.
“This is Ukraine’s finest hour, an epic chapter in your national story that will be remembered and recounted for generations to come,” he will say.
Johnson will also announce a £300m package in extra military support, which will include electronic warfare equipment, a counter-battery radar system, GPS jammers and night-vision devices.
