As Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Ukraine, he encountered an all too familiar scene: a country struggling to defend itself from without and reconstruct itself from within, writes The New York Times.

Blinken is the first senior Biden administration official to visit Kyiv, and his task when he meets with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, will be to reassure him of American support against Russia’s ongoing aggression, which flared last month when Moscow built up more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s eastern border.

At the same time, Mr. Blinken will also renew American calls for change in Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt political system. That message acquired new urgency after Ukraine’s government last month ousted the head of the country’s national energy company in a move a State Department spokesman condemned as “just the latest example of ignoring best practices and putting Ukraine’s hard-fought economic progress at risk.”