How Zelensky Ended Political Discord and Put Ukraine on a War Footing

In the two months since the start of the war, the Biden administration has steadily increased military assistance while at the same time imposing wider sanctions aimed at crippling the Russian economy. The assertion by the top U.S. defense officials that America wants to degrade the Russian war machine reflected an increasingly emboldened approach from the Biden administration.

Mr. Austin, who made his comments during a brief news conference on the Polish-Ukrainian border, was joined by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who said that Russia had failed in its goal of destroying the Ukrainian state. U.S. diplomats would soon be returning to Ukraine, he said, and he expected the embassy in Kyiv to reopen in a few weeks.

“Russia is failing,” he said. “Ukraine is succeeding.”

Here is what else is happening:

• Russian missile strikes targeted at least five railway stations in central and western Ukraine early Monday, according to the country’s railway service. The agency’s director said there were casualties but released no details.

• The United States is moving to reopen its embassy in Kyiv and, for the first time since 2019, nominate an American official to lead it. President Biden is set to announce the nomination of Bridget Brink, the current U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, as ambassador to Ukraine on Monday, according to a senior State Department official.

• Large fires were burning at an oil depot in the Russian city of Bryansk, about 60 miles north of the border with Ukraine, Russian state news media said. The reports did not indicate a cause.

• One person was killed in a Russian rocket attack in the central Poltava region on Sunday, according to the region’s governor, Dmytro Lunin. Seven people were injured in the attack, Mr. Lunin said, calling it the “largest shelling of the region during the full-scale Russian invasion,” in a post on Telegram.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III met with Mr. Zelensky for three hours late Sunday evening. The pair said they traveled to and from the capital by train but the details of the journey were a tightly guarded secret. It is unclear when they crossed the border out of Ukraine into Poland but they held a news conference at a warehouse in Poland at around the same time as the strikes were being reported.

“This morning, within an hour, five railway stations in central and western Ukraine came under fire,” Ukraine’s railway head, Oleksandr Kamyshin, reported in a Telegram post at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, adding that there were victims from the attack and at least 19 trains had been delayed.

Separate attacks on railways were reported by local officials in the regions of Zhytomyr, Rivne and Lviv.

A video posted by Lviv’s governor, Maksym Kozytskyi, shows a plume of black smoke billowing from a railway station in the village of Krasne, about an hour outside the city.

There was “no information about the victims,” he wrote in a Telegram post, but emergency services were working on the scene to assess the damage. The attack was probably carried out by a Russian Tu-95 strategic bomber, flying in the southeastern part of the country, Mr. Kozytskyi said.

The bomber fired two missiles, one of which was destroyed by Ukraine’s missile defense system, he said.

“The enemy is trying to strike at critical infrastructure,” Vinnytsia’s governor, Serhiy Borzov, said in a Telegram post.

Russian strikes in his region, he said, were directed at critical infrastructure in a city and a town, Zhmerynka and Koziatyn, but he did not offer details about the targets.

“Unfortunately, there are dead and wounded,” he said, adding that firefighters, local police and rescue workers were already on the scene.

Mr. Macron has been one of the few Western politicians willing to engage with Mr. Putin, relentlessly trying to push the Russian leader toward diplomacy. Since the start of the war on Feb. 24, the two presidents have had nine telephone conversations, according to the Kremlin.

However, Mr. Macron has been bound by the French commitment to the trans-Atlantic unity, something that Ms. Le Pen, his rival, was willing to weaken. Ms. Le Pen, whose National Rally party borrowed millions from a Russian bank over the past decade, said rapprochement with Russia would be her foreign-policy priority once the fighting in Ukraine stopped.

A victory by Ms. Le Pen would have been seen as a great triumph for Mr. Putin, who has risked his country’s long-term economic well-being for the sake of territorial gain in Ukraine.

For some commentators in Russia, however, it wasn’t Ms. Le Pen’s far-right or pro-Moscow stance that prevented her from getting elected, but that she did not go far enough in endorsing the Kremlin.

Zakhar Prilepin, a conservative Russian writer and politician, said on social media that instead of “trying to get glued together with Macron into one undistinguishable ball,” Ms. Le Pen “had to say that she supports the special operation, would quit NATO, and send the Foreign Legion, Algerian special forces and her own security detail to Belgorod for drills.”

It was a crystallizing moment for Mr. Zelensky’s government, ensuring a wide array of agencies kept running efficiently and in sync. Leading politicians put aside the sharp-elbowed infighting that had defined Ukrainian politics for decades and instead created a largely united front that continues today.

No senior officials defected or fled, and the bureaucracy quickly went onto a war footing.

“In the first days of the war, everybody was in shock, and everybody was thinking what to do — stay in Kyiv or evacuate,” said Serhiy Nikiforov, Mr. Zelensky’s spokesman. “The president’s decision was no one goes anywhere. We stay in Kyiv, and we fight. That cemented it.”

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To much of the world, Mr. Zelensky is best known for appearing by video link with a daily message of courage and defiance, to rally his people and exhort allies to provide weapons, money and moral support. On Sunday he commanded global attention again in a meeting in Kyiv with two top American officials, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, who pledged more military support and — in a move of symbolic importance — said the United States would move to reopen its embassy in Kyiv.

But behind the scenes, Mr. Zelensky’s success so far is also rooted in the government’s ability to operate smoothly and take measures to help people cope, such as sweeping deregulation to keep the economy afloat, and to provide essential goods and services.

By loosening rules around transporting cargo, for instance, the government was able to address a dire risk of food shortages in Kyiv, the capital, in the early days of the war. And in March he dropped business taxes to 2 percent — and then only if the owner wanted to pay.

“Pay if you can but if you cannot there are no questions asked,” Mr. Zelensky said at the time.

More contentiously, he combined six television stations that previously competed against one another into one outlet for news. The merger, he said, was necessary for national security, but it frustrated political opponents and free speech advocates.

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He has also forged a truce with his primary domestic political opponent, former President Petro O. Poroshenko, with whom he had been feuding right up until the start of the war.

A tremendous wartime effect of rallying around the flag undoubtedly eased Mr. Zelensky’s job, said Volodymyr Yermolenko, editor in chief of Ukraine World, a magazine covering politics. “The peculiar thing about Ukrainian politics is the agency comes from society, not the political leaders,’’ he said. “Zelensky is who he is due to the Ukrainian people, who are behind him, showing courage.”

He added that, “this is not to undermine his efforts” and credited Mr. Zelensky for adapting his populist, prewar politics into an effective leadership style in the crucible of conflict.

These days Mr. Zelensky’s workplace on Bankova Street is a hushed, darkened space crowded with soldiers; there are firing positions protected by sandbags in the corridors and on stairway landings. “We were prepared to fight exactly in this building,” said Mr. Nikiforov.

A former comedic actor, the Ukrainian leader has surrounded himself with a group of loyalists from his days in television, relationships that prompted accusations of cronyism in the past but that have served him well during the conflict by keeping his leadership team on the same page. And Mr. Zelensky has structured his days in a way that works for him.

Mr. Zelensky receives one-on-one phone briefings from Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the commander of the armed forces, multiple times a day and often first thing in the morning, aides and advisers said.

This is followed by a morning video conference with the prime minister, sometimes other members of the Cabinet, and military and intelligence agency leaders in a format that combines military and civilian decision making, according to Mr. Nikiforov, his spokesman.

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To be sure, Mr. Zelensky’s video addresses — to the U.S. Congress, to the British Parliament, to the Israeli Knesset and other governments — remain the defining and most effective element of his wartime role. The Ukrainian and Russian armies are still in pitched battles in the eastern plains, but in the information war Kyiv has clearly won.

Delivered with passion by a former actor with a keen sense of narrative and drama, Mr. Zelensky’s speeches have rallied his countrymen and galvanized international support.

Some are ad-libbed and others more scripted. A 38-year-old former journalist and political analyst, Dmytro Lytvyn, has reportedly served as Mr. Zelensky’s speechwriter. Mr. Nikiforov, the spokesman, confirmed the president is collaborating with a writer but declined to say with whom.

Politically, Mr. Zelensky made some early moves that allowed him to reduce any internal strife that might detract from the war effort.

Among them was the uneasy rapprochement with Mr. Poroshenko, who had sharply criticized Mr. Zelensky since losing to him in the 2019 election. Their squabbling continued even as Russia massed troops on the border, with Mr. Zelensky’s prosecutor putting Mr. Poroshenko under house arrest for various politically tinged cases.

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But the day that Russia invaded, the two leaders reached an understanding. “I met with Mr. Zelensky, we shook hands,” Mr. Poroshenko said in March. “We said that we are starting from scratch, he can firmly count on my support, because now we have one enemy. And the name of this enemy is Putin.”

Mr. Zelensky outlawed another main opposition faction, a Russian-leaning political party.

It has helped that Mr. Zelensky’s political party, Servant of the People, won a majority of seats in Parliament in 2019, allowing him before the war to appoint a Cabinet of loyalists. Past Ukrainian governments were divided between feuding presidents and opposition-controlled cabinets.

“Not on paper, but in reality, it’s all one big team,” said Igor Novikov, a former foreign policy adviser. “It’s very close knit.”

Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former minister of economy and now an economic adviser to the president’s office, likened Ukrainian politics to “loved ones fighting.’’

“It’s a family fight,’’ he said. “But family comes first.’’

The inner circle is made up largely of media, movie and comedy industry veterans with backgrounds similar to Mr. Zelensky’s.

Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff and a former movie producer, is widely viewed as the second most-powerful politician in Ukraine, though the constitutional successor is the Speaker of Parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, who early in the war was evacuated to western Ukraine. Mr. Yermak oversees foreign and economic policy.

Other key advisers are Mykhailo Podolyak, a former journalist and editor who is a negotiator with the Russians; Serhiy Shefir, a former screenwriter, now a domestic political adviser; and Kirill Tymoshenko, a former videographer now overseeing humanitarian aid.

The top military command is made up of officers, including General Zaluzhnyi, experienced in fighting Russia through the eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine.

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In the first days of the war Mr. Zelensky set three priorities for his government’s ministries, according to Mr. Mylovanov: weapons procurement, shipments of food and other goods, and maintaining supplies of gasoline and diesel. The ministries were told to rewrite regulations to ensure swift delivery on all three tracks.

That was perhaps most helpful in the frantic rush early on to get food to Kyiv, which was at risk of being besieged and starved.

With the supply chain disrupted, the presidential office brokered an arrangement among grocery chains, trucking companies and volunteer drivers to establish a single trucking service supplying all food stores. Stores would post a request on a website, and whichever driver was available would fill the order either for free or for the cost of gasoline.

Perhaps the most controversial move Mr. Zelensky made was to combine the six television newsrooms into one channel with a single report. Omitted from the group was the main opposition television station, Channel 5, affiliated with Mr. Poroshenko.

Mr. Zelensky positioned the move as necessary for national security. Opponents viewed it as a troubling instance of the government suppressing dissent.

“I do hope that wisdom will prevail, and the intention is not to use this to keep political competitors down,” said Volodymyr Ariev, a member in Mr. Poroshenko’s Solidarity political party.

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Transparency in the Ukrainian Parliament has also been a casualty of war.

The Parliament sits at irregular, unannounced intervals lasting an hour or so, for security reasons, lest a quickly targeted Russian cruise missile strike.

To hasten sessions, members do not debate bills publicly in the chamber but in private while drafting them, according to Mr. Ariev. Then parliamentarians gather in the stately, neo-Classical chamber, quickly vote, then scatter.

Mr. Mylovanov, the economic adviser to the president, said Ukraine’s pluralistic political culture would bounce back. Unity now is necessary, he said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We will be back to fighting over a liberal versus protectionist economic policy, price controls, how to attract investments, and all the rest of it.”

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kyiv.

The visit also resulted in a striking redefinition of success for America’s goals in Ukraine.

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Mr. Austin said. “It had already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

The two cabinet secretaries spoke in a warehouse standing in front of tall stacks of humanitarian aid, while across from them were green-painted wooden boxes of munitions for Soviet-designed weapons used by Ukrainian troops — striking visual reminders of the kinds of aid the United States is providing Kyiv.

All of it would be inside Ukraine’s borders by the end of the day, Mr. Blinken said.

Last week, Mr. Blinken’s and Mr. Austin’s staffs were planning a trip to an Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany, to meet with officials from other nations on Tuesday to discuss ways they could help Ukraine in its fight against Russia. A handful of those same staffers worked in parallel, on a need-to-know basis, to plan a stop beforehand in Kyiv so the secretaries could personally inform President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that President Biden would quickly re-establish the United States’ embassy in the Ukrainian capital and provide hundreds of millions of dollars in additional military aid. It would be an unannounced trip by the highest-level delegation of American officials since the Russian invasion began.

Participants who ended their week thinking they would be leaving for Germany on Monday morning were told on Friday afternoon that plans had changed.

Both Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin boarded military C-17 transport planes early Saturday morning at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, driving directly onto the tarmac and lifting off with the secrecy of their mission intact.

That secret held until about halfway through the nine-hour flight to Poland.

In an apparently unscripted remark Saturday afternoon during a news conference in the Ukrainian capital, Mr. Zelensky announced that Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin would be arriving in Kyiv the next day. Shortly afterward, a senior defense official emerged from Mr. Austin’s quarters in the C-17’s cargo hold and somewhat sheepishly informed the three reporters accompanying the defense secretary that President Zelensky had blown the operation’s cover and the future of the trip was uncertain.

However, Pentagon officials had planned for a number of contingencies, and having details of the secret trip leak out was among them. So the two cabinet members’ planes pressed on.

After arriving in Poland early Sunday morning, Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin climbed into cars and were driven across the border into Ukraine to begin an 11-hour train ride to Kyiv. They were accompanied by just a few of their staff members, and their location was tracked minute by minute in a U.S. military tactical operations center in Poland.

While the secretaries were en route to Kyiv, a senior State Department official and a senior defense official offered reporters in Poland a preview of what Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin would be offering to Mr. Zelensky.

The officials did not have any information on whether Marines would be posted to guard the embassy in Kyiv once it reopens, but they did add that Mr. Biden plans to quickly nominate an ambassador to lead it.

According to the senior defense official, the first group of more than 50 Ukrainian artillery soldiers on Sunday completed their training on 155-millimeter howitzers provided by the United States, which are slightly different in design to the Soviet-era 152-millimeter guns that have been used by Ukrainian forces since the country gained independence. A second group of Ukrainian artillery specialists would soon begin another six-day training course, the official added.

The cabinet secretaries returned to Poland, near the Ukrainian border, Monday morning after traveling nearly nonstop over the previous two days.

Immediately after briefing reporters, Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin met with soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division and thanked the troops for their service, then boarded Air Force cargo planes to head to Ramstein.

In Germany, Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin will be joined by the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, and the Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksiy Reznikov, to offer a battlefield update to officials from more than 20 nations. They are also expected to discuss the deployment of new military aid to Ukraine and how each country can use their own defense industries to produce goods in high demand by Ukraine.

“The first step in winning is believing that you can win,” Mr. Austin told reporters. “And so they believe that we can win, we believe that they can win if they have the right equipment, the right support.”

“We’re going to do everything we can — continue to do everything we can to ensure that gets to them,” he added.

The Pentagon sources much of the American-made weaponry it sends to Kyiv from its own stockpiles, but relies on American defense contractors to scour Eastern European munitions factories to find newly made weapons designed by the United States’ former adversary, the Soviet Union, to fulfill President Biden’s pledges of increased military aid for Ukraine.

Ukraine still uses many weapons common to the Russian army, such as modern Kalashnikovs. And while Ukraine’s pleas for more sophisticated weaponry — such as Javelin anti-tank and Stinger antiaircraft missiles — have received widespread attention, the country’s military has pressing needs for a wide range of munitions, including tens of millions of rounds for Soviet-era arms that are not on the cutting edge but are staples of the Ukrainian military.

The Pentagon calls such arms, including rockets, artillery shells and ammunition for machine guns and assault rifles, “nonstandard ammunition” — given that the munitions are incompatible with those used by the United States and many allied nations, which are generally known as NATO-standard ammunition.

And since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon has been buying large amounts of such weapons through a variety of American defense firms to supply client armies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other countries that still rely on Soviet-designed arms.

One of those companies is the Ultra Defense Corp. in Tampa, Fla., which has about 60 employees and has built a bustling business working with factories in Romania, Bosnia, Serbia, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Bulgaria.

Those countries provide about 90 percent of the nonstandard ammunition purchased by the Pentagon, according to Matthew Herring, the company’s owner, though his firm provides just a fraction of the Pentagon’s total orders.

Mr. Herring, who bought the company in 2011 when it was a three-person firm providing Russian-made helicopters to Afghan forces, is now in Poland meeting with Ukrainian officials to find out what else his company can do to provide them with Eastern Bloc munitions.

“A month ago, when Kyiv was surrounded, it was, ‘What do we need in the next 48 hours?’” Mr. Herring said. “But now the Ukrainians are digging in for a long fight and it’s, ‘How do we get enough to sustain us in this fight?’”

“So it’s a longer view about what they now need,” he added.

The Pentagon’s nonstandard ammunition program was built in direct response to an investigation by The New York Times in 2008 that exposed illegal sales of Chinese-made arms to the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, which became the subject of the 2016 movie “War Dogs.”

According to Mr. Herring, after that scandal, the Pentagon contracted with large defense firms to provide nonstandard ammunition for Afghanistan and later allowed small companies like his to offer bids for the same kinds of services.

Whether certain European nations that still make Soviet-designed munitions will sell their wares to Ukraine is a political decision — one that may depend in part on whether they value maintaining a good relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, a former Army Ranger who serves on the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, said in an interview last week that much of Ukraine’s nonstandard ammunition “very rapidly will be depleted” because of the current pace of combat with Russia.

The Ukrainian military will ultimately need to transition to NATO-standard weapons in the future, he said, so that it can further take advantage of the West’s vast stockpiles of ammunition sitting in bunkers across Europe and the United States.

That move is already underway, in part, through the Pentagon’s provision of five battalions’ worth of 155-mm howitzers to fulfill Ukraine’s pressing needs for what it calls long-range fires, which are similar in capability to the Soviet-designed 152-millimeter guns that Ukraine has been using against Russia.

So while businesses like the Ultra Defense Corp. will still buy as many 152-millimeter artillery shells as it can for Ukraine’s legacy artillery weapons, the Pentagon is aggressively moving in 184,000 shells from its stockpile in Europe for the 155-millimeter howitzers it has pulled from Army and Marine Corps stockpiles in the United States and shipped to Kyiv.

At a news briefing last week, John F. Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said nonstandard ammunition remained an important part of the supply of arms the United States is providing Ukraine.

“It’s the lifeblood here for the Ukrainian armed forces,” Mr. Kirby said of the ammunition supplies being given to Kyiv. “We don’t talk a lot about small arms ammunition. It doesn’t get the headlines, I understand that, but at every discussion we have with the Ukrainians, they talk about how important that is.”

Since the invasion, he said, the United States has coordinated and delivered more than 50 million rounds of small arms ammunition to Ukraine, much of it Soviet-designed. Mr. Kirby said the United States was continuing to “talk to allies and partners about their inventories of nonstandard ammunition” in an effort to get more munitions to Ukraine.

“It is having a truly significant impact on the battlefield,” he said of the Soviet-designed ordnance. “They use that ammunition literally every day in defending their country.”

John Ismay reported from an undisclosed location in Poland near the Ukrainian border and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

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In a move of symbolic and practical significance, the delegation told the Ukrainian president that the United States would move to reopen its embassy in Kyiv, and for the first time since 2019, nominate an American official to lead it.

President Biden is set to announce the nomination of Bridget Brink, the current U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, as ambassador to Ukraine in Washington on Monday morning, according to a senior State Department official.

The coming changes were announced in a briefing to reporters in Poland by a senior State Department official and a senior defense official who were not authorized to speak publicly about coming policy changes.

American diplomats will begin crossing the border into Ukraine this week, the State official said, and will reopen the Kyiv embassy as soon as feasible to begin re-establishing contacts throughout the country in person.

Mr. Blinken’s and Mr. Austin’s trip had been planned in extraordinary secrecy, with only a small portion of their staff aware of their intent to visit Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv and even fewer allowed to travel with them. The trip remained under wraps until it was well underway, with both cabinet secretaries flying in nondescript Air Force cargo planes that were about halfway to Poland when the Ukrainian president unexpectedly announced the U.S. visit in a news conference on Saturday.

In the latest of a series of increasing military aid announcements, Mr. Biden is expected to commit $713 million in new military financing for Ukraine and 15 other nations in Eastern Europe, the State Department official said, raising the United States’ total military aid to Kyiv to $3.7 billion since Feb. 24.

The funding is intended to assist the Ukrainians in the fight for the Donbas region by allowing Ukraine’s troops to transition to more advanced weapons and air-defense systems, the officials said. The assistance will also go toward funding ordnance used by Soviet-designed weapons like rockets, assault rifles and machine guns still used by the Ukrainian army.

The Biden administration has backed Ukraine with aid and weaponry, and has helped lead an international campaign of sanctions against Russia. But it had been under growing pressure to send a high-level official to Kyiv after recent visits there by several European officials, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, who walked the streets with Mr. Zelensky, and the prime ministers of Spain and Denmark.

U.S. officials purposefully did not announce the visit ahead of time, but Mr. Zelensky revealed Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin would come to Kyiv in a news briefing on Saturday, saying he would use the meeting to discuss “the military assistance we need.” The Pentagon and State Department did not immediately comment as it pressed ahead with getting the cabinet secretaries in and out of the country as safely and quietly as possible.

Mr. Blinken was the last high-ranking U.S. official to visit Ukraine when he stopped there in mid-January. The United States closed its embassy in Kyiv on Feb. 14 and its diplomats soon left the country.

Russia’s invasion began 10 days later, and as it tried to seize the capital in an initial offensive, parts of Kyiv were struck by shelling and Ukrainian and Russian forces fought in the streets of Kyiv’s suburbs. But Russia’s retreat from the area around Kyiv appears to have made the city far less dangerous than it was a few weeks ago, and Western leaders have been taking the opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with Mr. Zelensky.

In March, only a few weeks after Russia’s invasion, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled to Kyiv on a mission that was kept tightly under wraps. Over the following weeks, they were followed by leaders of Britain, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Estonia, Spain and Denmark. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, visited both Kyiv and Bucha, where, in the wake of Russia’s retreat, journalists and investigators have found evidence of atrocities.

In March, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Poland, where she expressed American support for Ukraine and U.S. allies in NATO and the European Union. Mr. Blinken went as far as Poland’s border with Ukraine, meeting with Ukrainian diplomats at a crossing used by hundreds of refugees over the course of an hour.

President Biden also visited a town near the border on a state visit to Poland on March 25, but he did not cross into Ukraine. He met with refugees and gave a speech in Warsaw the next day.

Previous visits by senior American officials to other war zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, were typically not announced until after the official had arrived in the country — and sometimes not even until after they had left.

Security concerns and contested airspace have still required leaders to make long journeys to reach Kyiv. The British government said that Mr. Johnson, whose visit in early April was unannounced, used several modes of transportation, including a train from eastern Poland.

The White House had ruled out sending Mr. Biden, citing not only the risk but Mr. Biden’s enormous security requirements. Senior cabinet officials such as Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin travel with smaller entourages.

John Ismay reported from an undisclosed location in Poland near the Ukrainian border; Eduardo Medina from New York; and Michael Crowley from Washington.

The delegation also told the Ukrainians that the United States would move to reopen its embassy in Kyiv, according to the officials.

Ms. Brink’s nomination will end a delay that career diplomats have said would be baffling even in more tranquil times. The Ukraine ambassadorship has lacked a full-time occupant since 2019, when President Donald J. Trump unceremoniously removed Marie L. Yovanovitch. Shortly after, William B. Taylor Jr., a retired veteran diplomat, stepped in on a temporary basis until early 2020. The post has remained empty during the Biden administration even as dire warnings were issued last year that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine.

Ms. Brink has been a Foreign Service officer for more than two decades, largely focusing on Europe and Eurasia. She was appointed to be the U.S. ambassador to Slovakia by Mr. Trump in 2019 and has served in two other former Soviet republics: Uzbekistan and Georgia.

Reports that the Biden administration intended to nominate Ms. Brink were not disputed by U.S. officials, but the Americans had been awaiting approval of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government before announcing her name. The approval is known by the French term agrément and is a customary part of the diplomatic process.

The Ukrainians gave Washington the agrément a few days ago.

“It’s a long time coming,” said Mr. Taylor, who testified to Congress during the first impeachment hearing of Mr. Trump. “I’m glad it’s finally happening.”

The U.S. mission in Ukraine has been managed by the chargé d’affaires, Kristina A. Kvien, a respected diplomat.

“It will be great to have a Senate-confirmed ambassador out there who clearly has the authority to speak to the president,” Mr. Taylor said. He added that Ms. Brink would likely have bipartisan support in Congress because a large number of Republican senators have been backing Mr. Biden’s efforts on Ukraine.

If confirmed, Ms. Brink will assume her role at a pivotal time in U.S.-Ukraine relations. She visited the Ukrainian-Slovak border the day after Russia’s invasion and said she had been “closely monitoring” the provision of aid from Slovakia to Ukraine.

The imminent return of American diplomats to the embassy in Kyiv is expected to be embraced by lawmakers from both parties and by Ukrainian leaders as well. “I know U.S. diplomats are eager to get back,” Mr. Taylor said. “It’s important to be in the capital. It’s important to talk to the Ukrainians and listen to the Ukrainians.”

At the same time, he said, “everybody understands the security concerns.”

John Ismay and Michael Crowley contributed reporting.

“They’re right now in Kyiv, talking to the president,” Mr. Arestovich said. “Maybe something will be decided regarding how they can help.”

The Biden administration has backed Ukraine with aid and weaponry, and has helped lead an international campaign of sanctions against Russia. But it had been under growing pressure to send a high-level official to Kyiv after recent visits there by several European officials, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, who walked the streets with Mr. Zelensky, and the prime ministers of Spain and Denmark.

U.S. officials did not announce the visit, but Mr. Zelensky revealed it in a speech on Saturday, saying he would use the meeting to discuss “the military assistance we need.” The Pentagon and State Department did not immediately comment.

Mr. Blinken was the last high-ranking U.S. official to visit Ukraine when he stopped there in mid-January. The United States closed its embassy in Kyiv on Feb. 14 and its diplomats soon left the country.

Russia’s invasion began 10 days later, and as it tried to seize the capital in an initial offensive, parts of Kyiv were struck by shelling and Ukrainian and Russian forces fought in the streets of Kyiv’s suburbs. But Russia’s retreat from the area around Kyiv appears to have made the city far less dangerous than it was a few weeks ago, and Western leaders have been taking the opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with Mr. Zelensky.

In March, only a few weeks after Russia’s invasion, the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled to Kyiv on a mission that was kept tightly under wraps. Over the following weeks, they were followed by leaders of Britain, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Estonia, Spain and Denmark. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, visited both Kyiv and Bucha, where in the wake of Russia’s retreat journalists and investigators have found evidence of atrocities.

In March, Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Poland, where she expressed American support for Ukraine and U.S. allies in NATO and the European Union. Mr. Blinken went as far as Poland’s border with Ukraine, meeting with Ukrainian diplomats at a crossing used by hundreds of refugees over the course of an hour.

President Biden also visited a town near the border on a state visit to Poland on March 25, but did not cross into Ukraine. He met with refugees and gave a speech in Warsaw the next day.

Previous visits by senior American officials to other war zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, were typically not announced until after the official had arrived in the country — and sometimes not even until after they had left.

Security concerns and contested airspace have still required leaders to make long journeys to reach Kyiv. The British government said that Mr. Johnson, whose visit in early April was unannounced, used several modes of transportation, including a train from eastern Poland.

The White House had ruled out sending Mr. Biden, citing not only the risk but Mr. Biden’s enormous security requirements. Senior cabinet officials such as Mr. Blinken and Mr. Austin travel with smaller entourages.

The U.S. visit follows Mr. Biden’s announcement on Thursday of an additional $800 million in military aid, including equipment designed to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s offensive in the east.

The family’s home was far from the steelworks mill where soldiers are sheltering underground, holding off Russian troops trying to take the city’s last vestige of territory held by Ukraine.

But Mariupol has been devastated by fighting, with shortages of medicine, food and electricity.

The couple did not own a car. When conditions became unbearable last Sunday, they packed the fraying bags with clothes and food and started walking with their four children. Their oldest child is 12, and their youngest, at 6, suffers from microcephaly, a rare condition that requires regular neurological monitoring and psychiatric consultations.

They left behind Mr. Tishchenko’s elderly mother, who could not walk, and their gray-and-white cat, named Mosia by Uliana, the 6-year-old.

Their journey out of the city was macabre: decomposing bodies, shelling in the distance, Russian military convoys and checkpoints.

“The city was turned into one big cemetery,” said Ms. Komisarova, 42. “We lived near Shevchenko Boulevard. There was a strip of land between two roads, and corpses were lying there for a long time. I’ve never seen so many dead bodies in my life.”

At each Russian checkpoint, they would say Ms. Komisarova had a sister in the next town. And at each checkpoint, perhaps moved by a large family struggling with children, the soldiers let them through. Some showed them photos of their own children.

“At one of them, a Russian soldier started asking us where we were going,” she said. “I said ‘Orikhove’. And then he said: ‘No, don’t go there. It’s being shelled. Go somewhere west.’”

She said they would stop in villages where people would let them stay.

In a village near Rozivka, she found out that the friend she had hoped to stay with had escaped. So they spent the night in a deserted house with other displaced people.

“We made a fire in a clay oven to keep warm, and then the neighbors came. They boiled potatoes with fried eggs for us. They fed us well,” she said.

On the fifth day, they were picked up by a man with a load of radishes and taken to the train station in Zaporizhzhia.

Arriving in Lviv, Ms. Komisarova and the children waited outside the station by the pile of luggage as Mr. Tishchenko went off to ask where they could find shelter. Looking around at the vehicles coming and going, the former high school teacher said she had forgotten what traffic looked like.

Her eldest daughter, Anna, 10, carried a Hello Kitty backpack and a green stuffed toy identical to the one her sister had been given along the way. A volunteer gave the children Easter chocolates they put in their pockets but did not eat.

Mr. Tishchenko, 37, has not been able to reach his mother but the children said their father had boarded up the shattered windows before they left, and they believed their grandmother would be all right.

They again hoisted the bags onto a street tram to take them to a resettlement office where they would be given a place to stay in a school that had been turned into a shelter for the displaced. At the office, one of the guards wiped tears from her eyes as she sat with the children while their parents were being interviewed.

Ms. Komisarova, a former Ukrainian language and literature teacher, said they intended to return when Mariupol was safe again.

“Honestly, we don’t have a specific plan where to go until then,” she said. “I remember the moment when we reached the first Ukrainian checkpoint and saw our flags and heard a soldier speaking our language. I was just sitting in the car and crying. We really want Mariupol to be Ukrainian again.”

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“We are prepared to leave the city because there is nothing left to defend,” Captain Palamar said by phone from inside the plant. “We consider that we’ve fulfilled our mission. But we will continue to defend it until there is an order to retreat from our military leadership. And if we are going to leave, we are going to leave with our weapons.”

On Thursday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia issued an order to halt the assault of the Azovstal factory. He called for a blockade instead, but the fighting continued, drawing crucial resources from Russian forces, even as preparations were underway for a significant offensive in eastern Ukraine.

“Despite the fact that today is an important Christian holiday, they bombed the factory all night,” Captain Palamar said.

The defense of the Azovstal factory in Mariupol is emblematic of the fierce, and to many unexpected, resistance of Ukrainian forces against their more powerful and more numerous adversaries. For nearly two months, a relatively small band of fighters has withstood a relentless barrage of attacks from land, sea and air, continuing to maintain a defensive perimeter that has prevented Russian troops from entering the territory of the plant, according to soldiers and officials.

But Captain Palamar and other soldiers interviewed by The Times said that they are short on time. Stocks of ammunition are dwindling and, perhaps more critically, rations of food and water are running dangerously low.

It is not clear how many people remain inside the plant — a sprawling complex consisting of a number of buildings with deep reinforced concrete bunkers that have been difficult for Russian forces to penetrate.

What is certain is that no one is coming for them. The rings of Russian defenses around the city are too heavily fortified for Ukrainian forces to mount an attack.

Ukrainian fighters at the plant say that they hope some neutral country might work to broker a deal that could allow them and the civilians sheltering in the plant to escape, perhaps by sea.

On Saturday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said he had discussed with his soldiers the impossibility of Ukraine’s military swiftly breaking through to their position by attacking from outside the Russian encirclement. There would be no immediate rescue.

“We are not preparing it at this moment,” he told the reporters gathered in the Maidan Nezalezhnosti subway station in Kyiv, the capital. “They clearly understand this. That is the reality.”

In the interview, Captain Palamar indicated that the Ukrainian fighters at the plant were not satisfied with efforts being made to extract them. He called on the military and political leadership of Ukraine “to save the lives of our fighters, who have done so much for this war, who have died heroically, been wounded and held practically the entire southeastern military group.”

“We can’t get out ourselves. Not without help,” he said.

Captain Palamar would not say how many fighters remain alive and in fighting condition, but admitted that more than 500 were wounded, some seriously.

The conditions, particularly for the wounded, are grim. There is a field hospital, but very little medical equipment or medicine remains. Video from inside the hospital that he sent via WhatsApp shows pale, largely motionless soldiers with an array of gruesome injuries sprawled on mats on a concrete floor. Anesthesia drugs are running low and some of the wounded require amputations, Captain Palamar said.

Every day brings new fighting and death, he and others at the plant said. The battle for Azovstal is being waged along a defensive ring on the outer rim of the factory complex, though heavy bombing has slowly reduced the areas from which Ukrainian soldiers can carry out the fight. As Russian forces have used increasingly large and powerful weapons, cave-ins have become a more common cause of death, he said, both to civilians and soldiers.

Fighting at the plant is being waged by a number of Ukrainian groups including national guard units, regular army, volunteer battalions and even some police officers. But the primary fighting force is the Azov Battalion, which is part of the National Guard of Ukraine. It is a force that does include nationalist soldiers, which the Kremlin has used to paint the unit as fascist. The unit has evolved into a regular combat force within the Ukrainian military.

Captain Palamar and others have ruled out surrender to Russian forces, saying they do not trust the Kremlin’s guarantees that it would abide by rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war.

“No one wants to surrender and end up in the hands of the Nazis or the Gestapo,” he said. “There are many examples of soldiers ending up as prisoners and contact with them is lost. Their fates are unknown.”

Maria Varenikova and Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kyiv.