When I was watching and writing about Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv this morning, I brought up the potential dangers involved with such a trip. The White House was busy for much of the day touting the “historic” nature of the visit, being the first time that a sitting President had traveled into a war zone where the United States military did not control all of the infrastructure and security. And missiles had indeed been falling around the capital region. But at the risk of committing one of the prime sins of journalism, I’m going to quote myself (again), specifically with one possibility I suggested, even if it seemed unlikely. I said:

“Of course, it’s possible that the White House went through back channels and notified the Kremlin that this would have been a bad time to fire any missiles into the capital city because “bad things might happen” if they were to inadvertently take out the American president.”

Well, it didn’t surface until later in the afternoon, but it turns out that’s exactly what happened. According to national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Moscow was informed “hours” before Biden even left on the trip. We’re not being given any details of who called whom or what was said, but Moscow was in the loop. (The Guardian)

The White House notified the Kremlin of President Joe Biden’s intention to visit Kyiv hours before he departed for Ukraine, as the details began to emerge of how the US president pulled off his high-profile diplomatic coup…

“We did notify the Russians that President Biden will be traveling to Kyiv,” Sullivan said. “We did so some hours before his departure for deconfliction purposes, and because of the sensitive nature of those communications I won’t get into how they responded or what the precise nature of our message was, but I can confirm that we provided that notice.”

So the “historic” trip may not have been quite as historic as it was first presented. That’s not to say that there still weren’t some dangers involved, but the primary one – the possibility that the Russians might find out and see if they could land a lucky shot – had been mostly mitigated.

I say “mostly” here for a reason. Sullivan is refusing to disclose specifically who was on the call and exactly what was said, but we can speculate with a high level of certainty. When a Russian counterpart was informed of the planned visit, they could have responded in one of three ways. They might have said, ‘Okay, we get it. No missiles while the boss is in town.’ And the trip would proceed. They might have said, ‘Do what you like, but we aren’t changing our strategy or making any assurances.’ They also might have not responded at all or even taken the call. Had either of those two possibilities taken place, you can rest assured that Joe Biden would have gone no further than Germany or perhaps Poland.

Of course, getting back to the “mostly mitigated” angle, just making an oral agreement on a secret phone call wasn’t a 100% guarantee. Some commander might have missed a memo and fired off some shots at Kyiv anyway. Or, in an even worse scenario, they might have lied and decided to try to take out the American president when the opportunity presented itself.

But is that even in the realm of possibility? I realize there have been a lot of questions raised lately about Putin’s mental state, but he would surely realize that killing the American president, particularly after everyone learned that Russia knew he was there, would result in such an outcry that it might be the one thing that would drag the United States (and likely some of our allies) directly into the war and his country would be destroyed. Much of the world would probably be covered in mushroom clouds, but Russia wouldn’t survive it given its current state of battle readiness.

So Joe Biden finally had his chance to go to Kyiv and embrace the track suit guy and promise him that the endless spigot of American cash and weapons would keep flowing “for as long as it takes.” Has anyone stopped to ask where the next pallet of money is coming from? I’m pretty sure the House has to approve all of those appropriations and there’s a new Speaker in charge. That’s just something to keep your eye on in the months to come.