Ukrainian meeting for US first lady

FIRST lady Jill Biden spent the US’s Mother’s Day in Slovakia, meeting Ukrainian mothers who have been displaced by Russia’s war and assuring them that the “hearts of the American people” are with them.

At a bus station in the city of Kosice that is now a 24-hour refugee processing centre, Jill Biden found herself in an extended conversation with a Ukrainian woman who said she struggles to explain the war to her three children because she cannot even explain it to herself.

“I cannot explain because I don’t know myself and I’m a teacher,” Viktoriia Kutocha, who had her arms around her seven-year-old daughter Yulia, told the first lady.

The 24-hour facility is one of six refugee centres in Slovakia, providing an average of 300 to 350 people daily with food, showers, clothing, emergency on-site accommodation and other services.

Biden, wearing a flower corsage on her wrist – a Mother’s Day gift from President Joe Biden – also dropped in at a Slovakian school that has taken in displaced students.

Slovakian and Ukrainian mothers were brought together at the school for a Mother’s Day event while their children made crafts to give them as gifts.

She went from table to table meeting the mothers and childre, telling some of the women that she wanted to come “and say the hearts of the American people are with the mothers of Ukraine”.

“I just wanted to come and show you our support,” she said.

Jill Biden is on a four-day visit to Eastern Europe to highlight US support for Ukrainian refugees and allied countries that are providing a safe haven for them.