Jill Biden to Ukrainian mother: Russian war ‘hard to understand’

First lady Jill Biden visits Slovak and Ukrainian mothers and their children as the families participate in a Mother’s Day activity in Kosice, Slovakia (Susan Walsh/Pool/AP)

US first lady Jill Biden has spent Mother’s Day in Slovakia, meeting Ukrainian mothers who have been displaced by Russia’s war and assuring them that the “hearts of the American people” are with them.

At a bus station in the city of Kosice that is now a 24-hour refugee processing centre, Mrs Biden found herself in an extended conversation with a Ukrainian woman who said she struggles to explain the war to her three children because she cannot even explain it to herself.