Jill Biden was president’s eyes and ears in Ukraine

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – The first telephone call Jill Biden made from her black SUV after an unannounced meeting with her Ukrainian counterpart inside the embattled country was to her husband.

Jill Biden and Olena Zelenska, who had not been seen in public since President Vladimir Putin sent Russia’s military into her country nearly 11 weeks ago, had just spent about two hours together at a school in Uzhhorod in western Ukraine.

With her visit to the Ukraine war zone, the U.S. first lady was able to act as a second pair of eyes and ears for the president, who so far has been unable to visit the country himself.

Jill Biden wrapped up her four-day trip to Eastern Europe on Monday after meeting in Bratislava with Zuzana Caputova, Slovakia’s first female president. Her trip over the border on Sunday to meet with Zelenska and refugees from elsewhere in Ukraine was a high point of the visit.

Seated across from Caputova, Jill Biden said she told her husband in their phone call “just how much I saw the need to support the people of Ukraine” and about “the horrors and the brutality that the people I had met had experienced.”

Ever since Russia opened war on Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been open about wanting President Biden to visit him in Kyiv.

The closest President Biden has been to Ukraine was a stop in Rzeszow, Poland, in late March after he went to Brussels to discuss the war with other world leaders. At the time, he lamented he was not allowed to cross the Polish border and go into western Ukraine.

“Part of my disappointment is that I can’t see it firsthand … they will not let me,” Biden said, likely speaking about the security concerns associated with presidential travel that are heightened by any talk of sending him to an active war zone.

The White House said as recently as last week that although the president “would love to visit” Ukraine there were no plans for him to do so at this time.

Security is a concern for the first lady, too. But when she travels solo, she flies on a smaller plane than the president’s Air Force One and with a significantly smaller “package” of Secret Service agents, Air Force crew members, White House staff and, sometimes, journalists.

The difference in the “footprint” makes it easier for a first lady to act as an emissary for the president and then tell him about what she picks up during her travels.