Austin, Blinken pushed on to Kyiv despite leak
Cabinet secretaries’ cover was blown in Zelenskyy remark
IN POLAND, NEAR THE UKRAINIAN BORDER — Nearly 48 hours since leaving Washington on what was supposed to be a clandestine mission, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with reporters to discuss an operation that was nearly over before it began.
“This was an important time to be there,” Blinken said Monday morning. “An important time for Ukraine, for the war, and an important moment to have face-toface conversations in detail.”
The two Cabinet secretaries spoke in a warehouse standing in front of tall stacks of humanitarian aid, while across from them were green-painted wooden boxes of munitions for Soviet-designed weapons used by Ukrainian troops — striking visual reminders of the kinds of aid the U.S. is providing Kyiv.
All of it would be inside Ukraine’s borders by the end of the day, Blinken said.
Last week, Blinken’s and Austin’s staffs were planning a trip to an Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany, to meet with officials from other nations Tuesday to discuss ways they could help Ukraine in its fight against Russia. A handful of those same staff members worked in parallel, on a need-to-know basis, to plan a stop beforehand in Kyiv so the secretaries could personally inform President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine that President Joe Biden would quickly reestablish the U.S. embassy in the Ukrainian capital and provide hundreds of millions of dollars in additional military aid. It would be an unannounced trip by the highest-level delegation of U.S. officials since the Russian invasion began.
Participants who ended their week thinking they would be leaving for Germany on Monday morning were told Friday that plans had changed.
Both Blinken and Austin boarded military C-17 transport planes early Saturday morning at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, driving directly onto the tarmac and lifting off with the secrecy of their mission intact.
That secret held until about halfway through the nine-hour flight to Poland.
In an apparently unscripted remark Saturday afternoon during a news conference in the Ukrainian capital, Zelenskyy announced that Blinken and Austin would be arriving in Kyiv the next day. Shortly afterward, a senior defense official emerged from Austin’s quarters in the C-17’s cargo hold and somewhat sheepishly informed the three reporters accompanying the defense secretary that Zelenskyy had blown the operation’s cover and the future of the trip was uncertain.
However, Pentagon officials had planned for a number of contingencies, and having details of the secret trip leak out was among them. So the two Cabinet members’ planes pressed on.
After arriving in Poland early Sunday morning, Blinken and Austin climbed into cars and were driven across the border into Ukraine to begin an 11-hour train ride to Kyiv. They were accompanied by just a few of their staff members, and their location was tracked minute by minute in a U.S. military tactical operations center in Poland.
While the secretaries were en route to Kyiv, a senior State Department official and a senior defense official offered reporters in Poland a preview of what Blinken and Austin would be offering to Zelenskyy.
The officials did not have any information on whether Marines would be posted to guard the embassy in Kyiv once it reopens, but they did add that Biden plans to quickly nominate an ambassador to lead it, which he did so Monday, selecting career diplomat Bridget Brink.
The Cabinet secretaries returned to Poland, near the Ukrainian border, Monday morning after traveling nearly nonstop over the previous two days.
Immediately after briefing reporters, Blinken and Austin met with soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division and thanked the troops for their service, then boarded Air Force cargo planes to head to Ramstein.
In Germany, Blinken and Austin will be joined by the NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, and the Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, to offer a battlefield update to officials from more than 20 nations. They are also expected to discuss the deployment of new military aid to Ukraine and how each country can use their own defense industries to produce goods in high demand by Ukraine.
“The first step in winning is believing that you can win,” Austin told reporters. “And so they believe that we can win, we believe that they can win if they have the right equipment, the right support.”
“We’re going to do everything we can — continue to do everything we can to ensure that gets to them,” he added.