“We will help you rebuild, rebuild your cities, your homes,” said U.S. President Joe Biden in a video posted to Twitter Saturday as he met with people in Poland, which has taken in more than 2 million refugees from Ukraine since a Russian invasion of the country began last month.
Biden traveled to Poland Friday to meet with Polish President Andrzej Duda and discuss “humanitarian and human rights crisis that Russia’s unjustified and unprovoked war on Ukraine has created,” said a press release from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
Ukraine is not part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – which was developed in opposition to the former Soviet Union – and thus does not trigger military response from member such as the U.S. However, the U.S. has provided more than $1 billion in aid to Ukraine since the invasion began.
“A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never erase a people’s love for liberty,” said Biden Saturday in Warsaw, Poland. “Brutality will never grind down their will to be free. Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia — for free people refuse to live in a world of hopelessness and darkness.”
Biden also remarked this weekend on the resistance of Ukrainians in the face of the invasion from a larger country with a larger military.
“I think even you Poles, who know Ukraine so well, have to be a little bit surprised at how what — how much courage and capacity for resiliency of the Ukrainian people,” he said. “When you see a 30-year-old woman standing there in front of a tank with a rifle — I mean, talk about what happened in Tiananmen Square; that’s Tiananmen Square squared.”
Though Ukraine has been fending off the attack in many parts of the country, some areas have been taken over by Russia. If they manage to prevail against the Russian Federation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “must plan the next steps for the nation,” said the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think tank.
According to The Washington Post, Ukrainian cities have seen “massive destruction,” as Russian troops bombed civilian homes, schools, hospitals churches and more. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been targeting Ukraine since at least 2014, when Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula, and has said he does not recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty and believes it is part of Russia.
“Helping the people in the immediate aftermath of a disaster – ensuring clean water, adequate power, medical care to the sick and wounded – takes priority,” said CSIS. Next comes recovery.
“The massive physical and natural infrastructure damage caused by the Russian attacks will require significant planning and investment – very likely in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” said the think tank. Even so, it said that recovery could be seen as an opportunity to improve and develop new infrastructure.
For now, Ukraine is still working to fight off the Russian invasion, and Ukrainians were fighting to get territory back in the Kharkiv region Saturday.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Saturday in a press release that the U.S. “intends to provide an additional $100 million in civilian security assistance to enhance the capacity of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs to provide essential border security, sustain civil law enforcement functions, and safeguard critical governmental infrastructure in the face of President Putin’s premeditated, unprovoked, and unjustified attack.”
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