Under oath, secrecy, no cellphone, and prove them wrong about him: How Jim LaPorta know that Biden visit to Kyiv before anyone
Under oath, secrecy, no cellphone, and prove them wrong about him: How Jim LaPorta know that Biden visit to Kyiv before anyone
Biden was given special permission to use an armoured limousine known as ‘The Beast’ at Queen Elizabeth's funeral months ago. Whitehall sources reportedly say Biden has been granted special dispensation. In comparison, all (other) leaders even like Macron, Scholz, Sultanates - Kings - Emirs from Middle East, or even former PM Liz Truss etc mandatory use a bus together, provided by the UK government. Biden has exclusive, because security.
So how does Biden, knowing that Putin’s Russia still showered Kyiv with missiles, can land in Kyiv?
The brutal honest, public around the world must thanks to Jim LaPorta.
A senior White House official and a U.S. government official with knowledge of the trip confirmed the visit on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The first ever (actually broke the (potential visit of) Biden to Kyiv is Rolling Stone, not Punchbowl Media (since October 2022, Punchbowl repeatedly very successful to be first ever media reporting breaking news/major news between White House and Capitol Hill). The person is Jim LaPorta, freelance Rolling Stones, who, unfortunately, got fired by AP after a missile fell down in Przewodow Poland. The missile already found / according assessments by the United States found that the missile was likely to have been an air defence missile fired by Ukrainian forces at an incoming Russian missile.
Despite claims from the White House for Biden having “no plans” to cross into Ukraine during his trip to Poland, plans to cross the Polish-Ukraine border began more than a month ago, after Biden told staffers he wanted a public display to show solidarity between the United States and embattled Ukraine as it enters its second year of war. Argue that Biden wants to visit Kyiv directly after the G20 Summit in Bali Indonesia, and for specific, after an incident missile fell down in Przewodow Poland (still / during the G20 Summit). Again, the first ever person broke the news via AP / Associated Press for incident in Przewodow is Jim LaPorta, but now hired as freelance for Rolling Stone.
Politically, this trip “needed to happen,” a senior White House official tells Rolling Stone. Over the past year, First Lady Jill Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and others in the U.S. government have made the trip to the war-torn country while the president himself had not — until now.
Biden was presented with an array of plans for this Ukraine trip, says the senior White House official with direct knowledge of the matter. The official was not authorized to speak on the record. One idea called for a meeting between Biden and Zelensky at an undisclosed location at the Polish-Ukrainian border. Another sought to hold the meeting in Lviv, a Western Ukrainian city that has been hit by Russian airstrikes several times since the war began but remains relatively safe when compared to the heavy fighting on the Eastern front.
Given the obvious fact that Ukraine is an active battlefield, both the Secret Service and the Defense Department had security objections to some of the plans presented. The Secret Service did not respond to Rolling Stone’s requests for comment, and the Defense Department referred questions to the White House.
The senior White House official says the concerns stemmed from the “unpredictability of the environment and the reduced security footprint required to support the movement of the president.”
Ultimately, Biden selected Kyiv, a city that stands as a symbolic gesture of Ukraine’s resolve after Russian forces tried and failed to capture the capital city early in the war last year.
Biden also plans to meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda and other leaders from the region. Biden will deliver remarks ahead of the official anniversary on Feb. 24.
Biden used Kyiv’s main station or another was unclear, with a Guardian journalist seeing no sign of extra security after coming into Kyiv central station about an hour later on Monday morning from Poland.
Arriving in Kyiv at 8am, Biden was met by a convoy of vehicles, which sped through closed-off roads to his meeting with Zelenskiy, using armoured vehicles that appeared to have been brought in discreetly in advance.
Biden had been due to leave Washington for his visit to Poland on Monday evening but, according to a small group of reporters who traveled with Biden to Kyiv, slipped out of Washington unnoticed at about 4am on Sunday.
According to the Washington Post, journalists accompanying Biden had agreed to withhold real-time details of the visit until he departed, including information about how he arrived in the Ukrainian capital.
Western surface-to-air missile systems have bolstered Ukraine’s defensives, but the visit marked the rare occasion when a US president has traveled to a conflict zone where the US or its allies did not have control over the airspace
Three US presidents had visited Iraq, including Biden’s predecessor, Trump, in what was seen as a major security operation. Obama, Trump and George W Bush also visited Afghanistan. But compared with Kabul and the US Bagram airbase, which hosted visits, Ukraine is viewed as a very different proposition. Yes, because the rival of Ukraine is Russia itself, the 2nd biggest military in the world (or 3rd, if the public thinks number 2 is China).
The risks were apparent from the outset. According to the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s visit to Kyiv was seen by his aides as “unprecedented in modern times” on the grounds that it was the first time a US president had visited “the capital of the country at war where the United States military does not control the critical infrastructure”.
That, White House officials are saying, is the distinction between this trip and previous presidential visits to Afghanistan and Iraq. In those countries, there was a massive US military presence, but there is none in Ukraine, and a minimal diplomatic presence, too.
The visit was planned over “a period of months” by a handful of his closest aides, with input from the NSC, the White House’s military office, as well as the Pentagon, state department, and the intelligence community.
“That required a security operational logistical effort from professionals across the US government to take what was an inherently risky undertaking and make it a manageable level of risk,” Sullivan said.
“But of course, there was still risk and is still risk in an endeavour like this, and President Biden felt that it was important to make this trip because of the critical juncture that we find ourselves at as we approach the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine.”
According to White House officials, the go-ahead for the trip was given on Friday, after receiving a final security briefing. Such was the level of secrecy the handful of US pool reporters had their mobile devices taken from them before departure.
The US told Russia that Biden was going to Kyiv a few hours before his departure, the White House has said.
“We did notify the Russians that President Biden will be traveling to Kyiv,” Sullivan said. “We did so some hours before his departure for deconfliction purposes, and because of the sensitive nature of those communications I won’t get into how they responded or what the precise nature of our message was, but I can confirm that we provided that notice.”
Although the White House has remained circumspect about how Biden travelled into Ukraine, a US official quoted by the New York Times suggested Biden arrived in Kyiv after a transatlantic flight to Poland and crossing the border by train, travelling for nearly 10 hours to Kyiv in the same way as other US officials have in recent months.
Other foreign leaders who have come to Ukraine – including the former British prime minister Boris Johnson as pioneer, then (together) the French President, Emmanuel Macron with Chancellor Germany Olaf Scholz, and (former) Prime Minister Mario Draghi Italy, also Jokowi (still, until today, only leader who visit Moscow and Kyiv after war started) – have also come in by train from Poland, a route used by journalists, aid workers and diplomats with Ukraine’s civilian airspace closed for the past year.