The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, ends his two-day visit to Kiev today with a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, and participation in the Independence Day celebrations.
The meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky has not yet been scheduled, but on Wednesday, as soon as he disembarked at the Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi railway station, the Portuguese head of state confirmed that he would be meeting Zelensky and later even admitted to inviting him to visit Lisbon at an appropriate time.
On the first day of his visit, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa visited some towns on the outskirts of Kiev that were under Russian occupation at the beginning of the invasion, exactly a year and a half ago.
The President of the Republic acknowledged that he had found a different country to the one that Prime Minister António Costa saw in May 2022, but he was still able to see the “scars” in the towns temporarily occupied by Russian troops outside the capital.
In the afternoon Marcelo took part in the summit organized by the “Crimean Platform” and considered any solution for the future of Ukraine that doesn’t include the issue of that peninsula as part of the country’s territory – it was annexed by Russia in 2014 – to be “noise”.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s visit was considered “historic” by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, as it was the second in 24 years by a Portuguese head of state.
The head of state also went into the trenches to get to know the reality of the inhabitants who organized themselves to repel the invasion in its first days in Moshchun, a town that was decimated and whose reconstruction is still far from over. Only one other president has done the same: Zelensky.
For security reasons, the Presidency of the Republic did not reveal details of the rest of the agenda.
The celebrations for the 32nd anniversary of Independence Day will take place as they did last year, without the usual parade and without crowds in the streets, because of the risk of Russian bombing.
Several heads of state and representatives of countries that support Ukraine are attending the celebrations.
This year, tanks and the carcasses of Russian combat vehicles captured by Ukrainian troops are on display on Kiev’s main avenue.
