May 28 (Reuters) – The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv remains open, it said on Thursday, denying reports about changes to its operations following warnings from Russia that diplomats and foreigners should leave the Ukrainian capital before it escalated attacks.
Some Ukrainian media on Thursday cited remarks by European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas that the U.S. embassy had left the capital.
Kallas told reporters on the sidelines of an EU meeting in Cyprus that all the foreign embassies in Kyiv had shrugged off the threat of attacks by Moscow, except one.
“What we heard from Ukraine yesterday was that all the embassies stayed except one,” Kallas said on Thursday. “All the Europeans stayed. America left.”
Several EU states summoned their Russian ambassadors after Moscow issued its warning to foreigners to leave on Monday.
In a post on X, the U.S. embassy in Kyiv said there had been no changes to its operations.
“The U.S. Embassy is open. There are no changes to our operations and reports otherwise are false,” it said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s communications adviser, Dmytro Lytvyn, told reporters that Ukraine had heard that some American diplomats had left Kyiv at the time of the latest massive Russian strike on Sunday.
He added that Ukraine was grateful to all the embassies that work in Kyiv and support Ukraine.
A representative of the U.S. embassy in Kyiv declined to comment on Lytvyn’s remarks.
The acting U.S. ambassador to Kyiv, Julie Davis, was in Lviv for an event at the weekend, according to the embassy’s social media post.
“The State Department has no higher priority than the safety and security of Americans and regularly reviews the security posture of Embassy Kyiv,” the embassy said in its post on X.
(Reporting by Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru, Anna Pruchnicka in Gdansk, Daniel Flynn in Kyiv Editing by Tomasz Janowski and Hugh Lawson)
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