Photo: Brandon Bell / Getty Images
By: EFE Updated 09 Sea 2022, 11: 36 am EST
The US Vice President, Kamala Harris, undertakes a trip to Poland and Romania that will include a meeting with Ukrainians who have fled their country after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, reported his office.
Harris’s trip to NATO’s eastern flank comes just after the Pentagon rejected for now a Polish proposal to move its MiG-fighters to Germany16, so that the United States would hand them over to Ukraine.
Harris will start his schedule of activities this Thursday, with two meetings with the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, and the country’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.
He will also hold a meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, who at just as she will be in the Polish capital, explained a senior US official dense, who requested anonymity, in a telephone press conference.
“In addition, (Harris) will have an opportunity to speak with people who have I fled the violence in Ukraine”, explained the source, without giving further details.
The Vice President will also meet with staff from the US Embassy in Warsaw and with diplomats from the US Mission in Ukraine, which suspended its operations in Kiev almost a month ago and moved them to Lviv, in the west of that country.
He will talk to them about the work they are doing to “support the people of Ukraine, the refugees who have left the country” and the US citizens in the area, said the official.
On Friday, Harris will meet with US and Polish servicemen to thank them
for his work, and then he will go to Bucharest, the Romanian capital, where he will meet c with the President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, and diplomatic personnel before returning to Washington.
The trip is the vice president’s second to Europe in three weeks, after participating in the Munich Security Conference, and aims to “demonstrate the unity and strength” of NATO in the face of the war in Ukraine, the source explained.
Harris will express his conviction that the war will result in “a notorious strategic defeat for Russia”, and will talk with his allies about how to strengthen sanctions against Moscow and humanitarian aid to refugees.
According to UN agencies, some two million people have fled Ukraine after the Russian invasion, which constitutes the worst flow of refugees in Europe since the Second World War, and the majority have ended up in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Moldova.
TheHarris’s arrival in Poland will come on the heels of an awkward episode that began on Tuesday, when the Polish government expressed its willingness to move all of its MiG-16, of Russian manufacture, to the American base of Ramstein, in Germany.
The proposal brought by surprise to the United States, which according to CNN had not previously discussed the matter with Poland and expected that country to deliver the planes directly to Ukraine in any case.
The Pentagon said Tuesday that the idea of passing the aircraft through the US base in Germany “is not sustainable” and “raises serious concerns” for NATO.
The aforementioned US official confirmed that Harris will follow up on this issue during her visit to Warsaw, given that the White House has been negotiating for days a plan for Polish planes to pass to provision of Ukraine, in exchange for Poland receiving American F-fighters 09 .
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