"The reason they tell me I've got to head out, I hadn't planned on going immediately, was because of the weather going back to Washington, and there's a little thing going on in Europe right now", Biden said at the end of his remarks on infrastructure, as the audience started laughing.
The "little thing" that Biden sarcastically referred to is a dramatic escalation of tensions at the line of contact in the breakaway Donbass region of Ukraine, where government forces have been shelling multiple locations in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics.
According to Ruslan Yakubov, the head of the DPR representative office at the Joint Centre for Control and Coordination of the Ceasefire, Ukrainian forces fired 93 mortar shells of various calibres at the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic on Thursday, the highest intensity of shelling since April 2021.