US President Joe Biden will visit the town of Rzeszow, about 80 kilometers from the border with war-torn Ukraine, on Friday on a visit to Poland, the second leg of his trip to Europe, announced the White House on Thursday.
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Arriving from Brussels after a marathon of summits, he will be received by Polish President Andrzej Duda at the airport of this city located two and a half hours by road from Lviv, the main city in western Ukraine.
He will then receive a briefing on “the humanitarian response in order to alleviate the suffering of civilians in Ukraine and to respond to the increasing flow of refugees fleeing the war that (Vladimir) Putin has chosen”, specified the White House in its press release. .
Joe Biden will then meet American soldiers positioned in this region and “who contribute, alongside our Polish ally, to NATO’s deterrence efforts on its eastern flank”.
The Democratic president is due to go to the capital Warsaw on Friday evening, where he will have a longer meeting with President Andrzej Duda on Saturday, as his official schedule already provided.
He will then deliver a speech “on the united efforts of the free world to support the Ukrainian people, hold Russia accountable for its brutal war and defend a future based on democratic principles,” according to the White House.
These two days of visit to Poland come after an extraordinary diplomatic marathon in Brussels, where Joe Biden has multiplied summits – NATO, G7, EU – to praise Western unity in its response to Russia, a month to the day after the start of its invasion of Ukraine.
At a press conference, the 79-year-old Democrat claimed that NATO had “never, ever been so united”.
On March 5, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had already traveled to Rzeszow, where he met Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau before heading to a Polish border crossing point with Ukraine.