According to the Post’s sources, Zelenska was supposed to sit near U.S. first lady Jill Biden and Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison in Russia last month.
But the Post said that caused discomfort for Ukraine’s top leadership, as many Ukrainians do not see Navalnaya and other Russian opposition figures as allies in the fight against President Vladimir Putin. That’s due to Navalny’s former remarks about Crimea “not being a sandwich to give back and forth,” which was viewed as backing Russia’s claim over the Ukrainian peninsula that it illegally annexed and occupied in 2014.
Navalny did later publicly support Ukraine’s restoration of its 1991 borders, while opposing the Russian attack on Ukraine.
In the end, Navalnaya also declined the White House’s invite to the State of the Union, citing fatigue.
The whole saga triggered some outrage in Kyiv.
“The world stubbornly wants to put Ukrainians and Russians side by side, implying, they say, that both are suffering from Putin’s authoritarianism. The victim and the aggressor are not equal,” Iryna Gerashchenko, a Ukrainian MP from the oppositional European Solidarity political party, said in a Facebook post.
“The tragedy of the Navalny family is not equal to the genocide of the Ukrainian people,” she added. “All Russians are responsible for this terrible war. They did not stop it.”
