Ukrainian leader downplays US president’s mistaken reference to him as ‘President Putin’ as he meets Ireland’s Harris
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has played down US President Joe Biden’s recent gaffe at a NATO summit, where he introduced the Ukrainian leader as “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 to the Ukrainians. We can forget some mistakes, I think so,” the Ukrainian president told reporters after landing at Shannon Airport in Ireland on Saturday.
Zelenskyy is visiting Irish leader Simon Harris on his return from a summit in Washington marking NATO’s 75th anniversary, where Biden, 81, made his faux pas on Thursday.
The US president, under intense scrutiny over his ability to run for another term in this year’s US presidential election, stumbled when announcing a NATO-Ukraine pact, mistakenly referring to Zelenskyy as “President Putin” as he ceded the stage to him.
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, weeks after a disastrous performance in the 2024 inaugural presidential debate against Republican rival Donald Trump.
Zelenskyy’s meeting with Harris is expected to cement Ireland’s support for Ukraine’s bid to join the EU. Upon his arrival in the country, the Ukrainian leader thanked Ireland for hosting Ukrainian refugees. “They were with us from the beginning of the Russian invasion,” he told reporters on the tarmac.
Kremlin warning
On Saturday in Ukraine, five civilians were killed in two separate Russian attacks targeting the northeastern region of Kharkiv and the southern region of Kherson.
Kharkiv regional governor Oleg Synegubov said Russian forces had attacked the Kharkiv village of Budy twice, firing a second time when emergency services arrived at the scene, killing a police officer and an emergency rescue official. Twenty-two people were wounded.
“This is not the first time that Russia has attacked emergency services while they were rescuing civilians,” Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said on social media.
In the southern Kherson region, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said three people – a 72-year-old woman, a 50-year-old woman and a 41-year-old man – were killed by Russian shelling.
Across the border, a Ukrainian drone strike sparked a fire at an oil depot in the Tsimlyansky district, deep in southwestern Russia’s Rostov region, in the early hours of Saturday – the latest long-range attack by Kiev forces on a border region.
