WASHINGTON (AP) – “We thought we could die.”
The Russian invasion had just begun when Nancy Pelosi made a surprise visit to Ukraine, the speaker of the House of Representatives, then the highest-ranking U.S. official to lead a congressional delegation to Kyiv.
Pelosi and the lawmakers were ushered into the capitol under the cover of secrecy, a secret passageway they will not reveal to this day.
“It was very, it was dangerous,” Pelosi told The Associated Press for the one-year anniversary of that trip on Sunday.
“We were never afraid of it, but we thought we might die because we’re visiting a serious, serious war zone,” Pelosi said. “We had great patronage, but a war nonetheless – theater of war.”
Pelosi’s visit was as unusual as it was historic, opening a new diplomatic channel between the US and Ukraine that has only been deepened by the protracted war. In the following year, a long list of congressional leaders, senators and chairs of powerful committees, both Democrats and Republicans, followed suit, interrupted by President Joe Biden’s own visit this year.
The steady stream of arrivals in Kyiv has served to cement a political and military partnership between the US and Ukraine for the world, one that will be tested once again when Congress is again expected to declare war this year. to help finance Russia.
“We have to win. We have to bring this to a positive end – for the people of Ukraine and for our country,” Pelosi said.
“There is now a struggle in the world between democracy and autocracy, its manifestation is in Ukraine at that time.”
With a new Republican majority in the House whose Trump-affiliated members have refused foreign investment, Pelosi, a Democrat, remains confident that Congress will continue to support Ukraine as part of a broader US commitment to democracy in the abroad in the face of authoritarian aggression.
“Support for Ukraine is bipartisan and bicameral, in both houses of Congress by both sides, and the American people support democracy in Ukraine,” Pelosi told the AP. “I believe we will continue to support as long as it takes to support democracy… as long as it takes to win.”
Now the speaker emerita, an honorary title bestowed by the Democrats, Pelosi is wary of her role as a US envoy abroad. Having visited 87 countries during her tenure, many as the pioneering first woman to be the Speaker of the House, she set a new standard for throwing the gavel out as she brought attention to the world beyond America’s shores.
In her office, tucked away in the Capitol, Pelosi shared many of the honors and mementos she has received from abroad, including the honorary passport she received while traveling to Ukraine, during her final stops as a speaker.
It’s a distinctive political style, one that builds on Pelosi’s decades of work on the House Intelligence Committee, but one that a new generation of House leaders may or may not want to emulate.
New chairman Kevin McCarthy this month received Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, marking the first time the Republican foreign affairs leader has taken office.
Democrat Hakeem Jeffries made his own first trip abroad as a minority leader in the House, leading congressional delegations to Ghana and Israel last week.
Pelosi said it’s up to the new leaders what they do on the world stage.
“Other speakers have understood our national security – we take an oath to protect and defend – and so we must reach out to our values and our strength to make sure this happens,” she said.
“I just want to say it was the most logical thing for me to do,” Pelosi said.
When Pelosi arrived in Kiev, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was outside to meet with US officials, a photo that reverberated around the world in support for the fledgling democracy fighting against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
“The president’s courage to greet us on the street instead of us just meeting him in his office was another symbol of the courage of the people of Ukraine,” she said.
Pelosi told Zelenskyy in a video released at the time “your fight is a fight for everyone.”
A year later, with no end in sight to the war, Pelosi said, “I had hoped it would be over by now.”
Pelosi’s travels abroad have not been without political challenges and controversies. During the Trump era, she acted as an alternative emissary abroad, reassuring allies that the US remained a partner despite the Republican president’s “America First” neo-isolationist approach to foreign policy.
Last year, on one of her last tours as a speaker, Pelosi landed with a delegation in Taipei as crowds lined the streets to cheer her arrival, a visit to the Taiwanese president that drew sharp rebuke from Beijing, which owns the island. regards as her own.
“Cowardly,” she said of the military exercises China launched in the aftermath of her trip.
Pelosi rarely praised McCarthy’s own encounter with Tsai, particularly its dual nature and the choice of the location of the historic Reagan Library.
“That was really a whole message and a whole optics to be there. And so I salute what he did,” she said.
In one of her closing acts as Speaker of the House in December, Pelosi hosted Zelenskyy for a joint address to Congress. The visit was reminiscent of the visit of Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Christmas time in 1941 to address Congress in the Senate chamber about a “long and hard war” at the start of the Second World War.
Zelenskyy presented to Congress a Ukrainian flag signed by frontline troops that Pelosi said will eventually be displayed at the US Capitol.
The world has changed a lot since Pelosi became a member of Congress – one of her first trips abroad was in 1991, when she dared to unfurl a pro-democracy banner in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square shortly after the student demonstrations that ended in a massacre.
After the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is again Russia and China that stand before her.
“Putin’s role in terms of Russia is more of a threat than when I came to Congress,” she said. Ten years after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, she said, Putin took off.
“That’s where the struggle for democracy takes place,” she said.
And, she said, despite the work she and others in Congress have done to highlight concerns about China’s military and economic rise and its human rights record, “that has only gotten worse.”
Often cited as someone who could become a true ambassador — there are speculations that Biden could nominate her to Rome or beyond — Pelosi said she is focused on her two-year term, no longer the speaker of the House, but the representative from San Francisco.
“Right now, my plan is to serve my constituents,” Pelosi said. “I’d rather have 750,000 bosses than one.”
