US President Joe Biden told his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda during a visit to Warsaw on Saturday that the United States considers Article 5 of the NATO Treaty on Mutual Defense a "sacred duty".
"You can count on that...for your freedom and our freedom," Biden told Duda, while the Polish president said his citizens felt "highly threatened" by the conflict in Ukraine.
Earlier, the US President held talks with the Ukrainian foreign and defense ministers at the Marriott Hotel in central Warsaw during a meeting with their US counterparts.
In this first meeting with senior Ukrainian officials since the beginning of the Russian invasion, Biden sat at a table next to the US Secretary of State and Defense Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, in front of the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Defense Dmytro Kuleba and Oleksiy Reznikov.
State Department spokesman Ned Price noted that the four ministers "spoke about the outcomes of the extraordinary NATO summit on March 24 in Brussels and the United States' unwavering commitment to Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity."
Blinken and Austin "promised continued support to respond to the humanitarian, security and economic needs of Ukraine as President Putin's large-scale invasion entered its second month," he said in a statement.
Biden had met the Ukrainian foreign minister in Washington on February 22, two days before the start of the invasion. He then met Kuleba in Poland at the Ukrainian border on March 5.
Biden arrived in Poland on Friday after a series of international meetings in Brussels, and began his talks with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda on Saturday afternoon.
He is scheduled to meet Ukrainian refugees at a reception center set up in a national stadium in Warsaw, and to deliver a speech at the end of the afternoon at the Royal Palace in Warsaw, before returning to Washington.
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- Agencies