Photo: Alexander Markushin
Justin Trudeau, Christia Freeland and Melanie Jolie meet with the mayor of Irpen, Ukraine, Alexander Markushin.
UPDATE: 9 in the morning
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau paid an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Sunday, where he reopened the Canadian embassy in Kyiv.
Trudeau must also meet in person with President Vladimir Zelensky for the first time since Russia began its invasion.
Deputy Prime Minister Christia Freeland and Foreign Minister Melanie Jolie joined Trudeau during the trip.
“The prime minister is in Ukraine to meet with President Zelensky and reaffirm Canada’s unwavering support for the Ukrainian people,” Trudeau’s spokesman Cameron Ahmad said in a written statement Sunday.
Canada began reducing its diplomatic presence in Ukraine in late January, when intelligence warned of an impending Russian invasion.
Representatives of most Western countries fled Ukraine when the war broke out, but more than two dozen have already returned, even as the conflict dragged on.
Several of Canada’s G7 allies have already returned to Kyiv – France and Italy in the third week of April and the United Kingdom last week.
On Sunday, Trudeau, Freeland and Jolie arrived at the embassy in Kyiv with a heavily armed security guard.
Larisa Galadza, Canada’s ambassador to Ukraine, joined them at a flag-raising ceremony. Eventually, they raised the flag on the side of the building after the first flagpole was broken.
The Canadian press was informed of Trudeau’s trip on condition that it was not announced until it was made public for security reasons.
The Associated Press reported that Jill Biden paid a surprise visit to western Ukraine today to meet with First Lady Olena Zelenska for Mother’s Day.
Other world leaders have traveled to Kyiv in recent weeks to show solidarity with Ukraine, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nechamer and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also went to Kyiv last week.
The public route to Trudeau, announced on Saturday, suggests that he will be in the National Capital Region on Sunday and will take part in a meeting of G7 leaders on the situation in Ukraine.
The visit comes as fears that dozens of Ukrainians have died after a Russian bomb destroyed a school housing about 90 people in eastern Ukraine.
The Luhansk district governor said on Sunday that 30 people had been rescued from the rubble of a school in the village of Bilogorovka, but the rest probably did not survive.
Elsewhere, more explosions shook the Black Sea port of Odessa.
Ukrainian soldiers, who are standing for the last time at the steel plant in the besieged city of Mariupol, have said they will not surrender after the evacuation of civilians from the area.
UPDATE: 8 in the morning
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau paid an unannounced visit to Ukraine today amid the Russian invasion.
The prime minister’s office said Trudeau would meet with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to show Canada’s support for the Ukrainian people.
Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Christia Freeland, along with Foreign Minister Melanie Jolie, joined Trudeau during the trip.
Photos published by the mayor of Irpin, Urcaine, a suburb of Kyiv, show Trudeau, Freeland and Jolie meeting with Mayor Alexander Markushin.
The Canadian press was informed of Trudeau’s trip on condition that it was not announced until it was made public for security reasons.
The Associated Press reported that Jill Biden paid a surprise visit to western Ukraine today to meet with First Lady Olena Zelenska.
Other world leaders have traveled to Kyiv in recent weeks to show solidarity with Ukraine, including British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nechamer and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also went to Kyiv last week.
“The prime minister is in Ukraine to meet with President Zelensky and reaffirm Canada’s unwavering support for the Ukrainian people,” Trudeau’s spokesman Cameron Ahmad said in a written statement Sunday.
The public route to Trudeau, released on Saturday, says he is in the National Capital Region and is attending a meeting of G7 leaders on the situation in Ukraine.
Photo: Alexander Markushin
Justin Trudeau meets with the mayor of Irpin, Ukraine, Alexander Markushin, right.
ORIGINAL: 6:35 p.m.
US First Lady Jill Biden paid an unannounced visit to western Ukraine on Sunday, holding a surprise Mother’s Day meeting with the nation’s first lady, Elena Zelensky, as Russia pushes its criminal war in the eastern regions.
Biden traveled under cover of secrecy, becoming the last high-ranking American to enter Ukraine during its 10-week conflict with Russia.
“I wanted to come to Mother’s Day,” Biden told Zelensky. “I thought it was important to show the Ukrainian people that this war must stop and that this war was brutal and that the people of the United States are with the people of Ukraine.
The first lady travels by car to the city of Uzhgorod, about a 10-minute drive from a Slovak village bordering Ukraine.
The two gathered in a small classroom, sat at a table facing each other, and talked to reporters before meeting in private. Zelenski and her children were in an undiscovered place for their safety.
Zelensky thanked Biden for her “brave deed” and said: “We understand what it takes for the first lady of the United States to come here during a war, when hostilities take place every day, where air sirens happen every day – even today.”
The school they met has become a temporary home for Ukrainian migrants from other parts of the country.
The visit allowed Biden to conduct the kind of personal diplomacy that her husband would like to do on his own.
President Joe Biden said during a visit to Poland in March that he was disappointed that he could not visit Ukraine to see the conditions “first hand”, but that he was not allowed to do so, probably for security reasons. As early as last week, the White House said the president “would like to visit,” but has no plans to do so.
The meeting took place after the two first ladies exchanged correspondence in recent weeks, according to US officials, who declined to give further details because they were not authorized to discuss the ladies’ personal communications.
When she arrived at the school, Biden, who was wearing a Mother’s Day corsage, a gift from her husband, hugged Zelensky and gave her a bouquet.
After their personal meeting, the two joined a group of children who live at the school to make teddy bears out of tissue paper for Mother’s Day gifts.
Jill Biden’s visit follows recent stops in the war-torn side of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress, as well as a joint trip by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to meet with President Vladimir Zelensky in Kyiv.
Her visit was limited to western Ukraine; Russia is concentrating its military power in eastern Ukraine, and it was not in danger.
Earlier in the Slovak border village of Vyshne Nemetske, she toured the border processing facility, examining operations set up by the UN and other humanitarian organizations to help Ukrainians seeking asylum. Biden attended a religious service in a tent set up as a chapel, where a priest sang, “We pray for the people of Ukraine.”
Earlier in Košice, Biden met and offered support to Ukrainian mothers in Slovakia who had been deported from the Russian war and assured them that the “hearts of the American people” were behind them.
At the city’s bus station, which is now a 24-hour refugee treatment center, Biden found himself in a lengthy conversation with a Ukrainian woman who said she was trying to explain the war to her three children because she herself could not understand it.
“I can’t explain because I don’t know myself and I’m a teacher,” said Victory Kutocha, who had hugged her 7-year-old daughter, Yuli, to Biden.
At one point, Kutocha asked, “Why?” He seemed to be looking for an explanation for Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine on February 24.
“It’s so hard to understand,” the first lady replied.
The 24-hour facility is one of six refugee centers in Slovakia, providing an average of 300 to 350 people a day with food, showers, clothing, emergency accommodation and other services, according to information provided by the White House.
Biden also attended a Slovak public school that accepted displaced students.
Slovak and Ukrainian mothers gathered at the school for Mother’s Day event while their children made crafts to give them as gifts.
Biden walked from table to table, meeting the mothers and children. She told some of the women that she wanted to come and “say that the hearts of the American people are with the mothers of Ukraine.”
“I just wanted to come and show you our support,” she said before leaving for Vysne Nemecke.
In recent weeks, border crossings have averaged less than 2,000 a day, less than more than 10,000 a day since Russia’s invasion on February 24, with much of this flow being daily cross-border traffic.
Biden is on a four-day visit to Eastern Europe to highlight US support for Ukrainian refugees and for allies such as Romania and Slovakia, which provide them with safe havens.
She spent Friday and Saturday in Romania, visiting US troops and meeting with mothers and refugee children from Ukraine.
With her trip, the American first lady followed in the footsteps of previous sitting first ladies, who also traveled to military or conflict zones.
Elinor Roosevelt visited servicemen abroad during …
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