Volodymyr Zelenskyy has played down US President Joe Biden’s recent gaffe at a NATO summit where he introduced the Ukrainian leader as Russian “President Putin”, saying it was a “mistake” that could now be forgotten.
“It’s a mistake. I think [the] United States gave a lot of support for Ukrainians. We can forget some mistakes, I think so,” the Ukrainian president told reporters after touching down at Ireland’s Shannon airport on Saturday.
Zelenskyy is visiting Irish leader Simon Harris on his way back from the summit in Washington, DC marking NATO’s 75th anniversary, where the 81-year-old Biden made his faux pas on Thursday.
The US president, under intense scrutiny over his ability to stand for another term in office in this year’s US presidential election, stumbled while announcing a NATO-Ukraine compact, mistakenly referring to Zelenskyy as “President [Vladimir] Putin” as he handed him the stage.
Though Biden quickly corrected himself, exclaiming that the Ukrainian leader was actually going to “beat” Putin, the incident drew more attention to his age and speculation about his mental acuity, coming weeks after a disastrous performance in the inaugural 2024 presidential debate opposite Republican rival Donald Trump.
Zelenskyy’s meeting with Harris is expected to cement Ireland’s support for Ukraine’s bid towards European Union membership. Arriving in the country, the Ukrainian leader thanked Ireland for hosting Ukrainian refugees.
“You were with us from the very beginning of the Russian invasion,” he told reporters on the tarmac.
Kremlin warning
In Ukraine on Saturday, five civilians were killed in separate Russian attacks on the northeastern Kharkiv region and the southern Kherson region.
Kharkiv’s regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said that Russian forces had struck the village of Budy in Kharkiv twice, firing a second time as emergency services arrived on the scene and killing a police officer and an emergency rescue official. Twenty-two people were injured.
“This is not the first time that Russia has attacked emergency services while they are rescuing civilians,” Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs Ihor Klymenko said on social media.
In the southern Kherson region, governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported that three people – a 72-year-old woman, a 50-year-old woman and a 41-year-old man – were killed by Russian shelling.
On the other side of the border, a Ukrainian drone attack sparked a fire at an oil depot in the Tsimlyansky district, deep inside Russia’s southwestern Rostov region in the early hours of Saturday – the latest long-range strike by Kyiv’s forces on a border region.
