Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska has declined an invitation to attend President Biden’s State of the Union address, according to reports.
Zelenska was intended to be seated next to U.S. first lady Jill Biden at the event on Thursday, according to The Washington Post.
The two first ladies would also have been arranged next to activist Yulia Navalnya, the widow of deceased Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
No reason has been given for Zelenska declining to appear at the address, but the decision to seat her near Navalnya struck many intelligence experts as bizarre.
The late Alexei Navalny is not popular among the citizens of Ukraine due to past statements supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“The fact that Team Biden wanted to host Yuliya Navalnaya and Alyona Zelenskaya in the same room is screaming evidence that they have no clue about the cultural, ethnic, and political dynamics between the Russians and Ukrainians, Moscow and Kiev, etc,” Russian-born U.S. military intelligence analyst Rebekah Koffler told Fox News Digital.
“Navalnaya and Zelenskaya are on the opposite sides – they are both nationalists, but one is a Russian nationalist and the other is Ukrainian. They cannot mix,” Koffler continued. “Navalnaya, who has vowed to continue her husband’s work, is like her husband — a nationalist, pro-Russia, pro-Slavic. Navalny, like many Russian dissidents, was a nationalist who espoused xenophobic, anti-immigration, Russia for Russians only, Imperialist philosophy.”
While Navalnaya later softened on the Russia-Ukraine issue and began showing more support for the smaller nation’s fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, his reputation never improved.
The decision to seat the Ukrainian first lady next to the deceased Russian activist’s wife was either an ill-fated attempt to encourage an alliance or a major oversight of the Biden administration.
“You have to be a thinking person, intellectually curious, and competent, to dig into all of these details,” Koffler told Fox News Digital. “And Biden as well as people surrounding him are simply looking at what’s on the surface. They have no in-depth 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.
