On March 2, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Ukrainian Catholic Archbishop Borys Gudziak of Philadelphia and the Ukrainian ambassador to the US at the Ukrainian Catholic National Shrine of the Holy Family in Washington.

Blinken said how inspired he was by the resilience of the Ukrainians, and later tweeted about the meeting.

Archbishop Gudziak called for “maximum immediate support” for Ukraine. “Every time over the last 250 years that a Russian regime —tsarist, Communist, or Putinist—has occupied Ukrainian lands on which the Ukrainian Catholic Church ministered, our church was declared illegal and strangled,” he said.