Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska declined an invitation to attend President Biden’s State of the Union address, according to reports.
Zelenska is slated to sit next to US first lady Jill Biden at Thursday’s event, according to The Washington Post.
The two first ladies were also lined up alongside activist Yulia Navalnya, the widow of slain Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
No reason was given for Zelenska’s refusal to appear at the address, but the decision to seat her near Navalnya struck many intelligence experts as odd.
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Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, arrives to address members of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC (Michael Reynolds/Pool Photo via AP)
The late Alexei Navalny was unpopular among Ukrainian citizens due to past statements supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“The fact that Team Biden wants to host Yuliya Navalnaya and Alyona Zelenskaya in the same room is screaming evidence that they have no idea about the cultural, ethnic, and political dynamics between Russians and Ukrainians, Moscow and Kiev, etc,” Russian-born US military intelligence analyst Rebekah Koffler told Fox News Digital.
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Yulia Navalnaya, wife of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, speaks at the Munich Security Conference in Munich. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Pool Photo/AP)
“Navalnaya and Zelenskaya are on opposite sides – they are both nationalists, but one is a Russian nationalist and the other is Ukrainian. They cannot mix,” Koffler continued. “Navalnaya, who promised to continue his wife’s work, is like his wife – a nationalist, pro-Russia, pro-Slavic. , imperialism philosophy.”
As Navalnaya softened on the Russia-Ukraine issue and began to show more support for the smaller country’s resistance against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, his reputation never improved.
The decision to seat the Ukrainian first lady next to the wife of a dead Russian activist was either a poor attempt to coax an alliance or a major oversight by the Biden administration.
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President Biden delivers his 2023 State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber of the US Capitol in Washington, DC (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“You have to be a thinking person, intellectually curious, and capable, to dig into all these details,” Koffler told Fox News Digital. “And Biden as well as the people around him are just looking at what’s on the surface. They don’t have a deep understanding of the regional dynamics in Eurasia and how the world works.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House and the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington for comment.
