Zelensky’s meeting with Harris and spat with Trump reveal growing partisan divide over Ukraine

Vice President Kamala Harris is meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a trip to the United States, unlike former President Donald Trump, highlighting the growing partisan divide on a key foreign policy issue.

Harris is scheduled to meet with Zelenskyy at the White House on Thursday. Trump will not meet with him while he is in the country this week for the United Nations General Assembly, and he has become increasingly critical of Zelensky, accusing him of having a favorite in the upcoming election.

“The president of Ukraine is in our country and he’s making nasty slander about your favorite president, me,” Trump said Wednesday in North Carolina. “Ukraine has disappeared. This is no longer Ukraine. … Any agreement, even the worst, would have been better than the one we have now.”

Zelensky had hinted he would meet with Trump this week, but Trump’s campaign said there had been no formal agreement for a meeting.

Trump has said for months, and he has repeated it more frequently at rallies this week, that he would immediately end the war in Ukraine – even if it was on terms favorable to Moscow – and he has called Zelensky a “big seller” for getting money for his country that wants Democrats to win “so bad” so the money keeps flowing.

“Every time Zelensky comes to the United States, he leaves with $100 billion,” Trump said Tuesday in Georgia. “I think he’s the greatest salesman in the world. But we’ll be stuck in this war if I’m not president. »

Trump and Zelensky have a complicated past. The House impeached Trump in 2019 after details surfaced about a call he made asking Zelenskyy to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Since the possibility of Trump’s return to power has become more realistic, Zelensky sometimes appears to be cautious when discussing Trump or responding to his critics.

Ukraine has enjoyed mostly bipartisan support in Congress since Russia invaded it in 2022. Biden has stepped up international efforts to rally allies to support Ukraine in what has turned into a long war. But some Republicans have become increasingly skeptical about continued support for the war effort.

Before his meeting with Zelensky Thursday afternoon, Biden said in a statement that the Defense Department would allocate its remaining security aid to Ukraine by the end of the year and that the department was announcing $2.4 billion dollars in security assistance for the country, by providing air services. defense systems, drones and air-to-ground munitions, Patriot missiles and money to strengthen the country’s industrial base. Biden also said he was authorizing the presidential withdrawal of $5.5 billion to fully utilize funds allocated by Congress to send U.S. military equipment to Ukraine and replenish U.S. stockpiles.

Harris said she would maintain U.S. support if elected.

Without strong support from the United States, it may be difficult for Ukraine to continue the fight against Russia.

The partisan divide appeared to widen this week after Zelenskyy visited a munitions factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden’s hometown, which Trump and other Republicans saw as a signal in which direction he wanted the November elections are taking place.

Republicans also took issue with recent comments Zelenskyy made to the New Yorker in which he called Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, “too radical” and said he needed to “educate himself on the history of the Second World War. » to understand why Russian President Vladimir Putin should not be appeased.

“My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war, even though he thinks he knows how to do it,” Zelenskyy added.

Vance also faced scrutiny for his suggestions on how to end the war. He recently spoke in a podcast interview about the possibility of creating a demilitarized zone as part of a “peace deal” that would include a guarantee of neutrality.

Zelensky said this amounts to forcing Ukraine to cede territory to Russia.

“His message seems to be that Ukraine must make a sacrifice,” Zelensky told the New Yorker. “This brings us back to the question of the cost and who will bear it. The idea that the world should end this war at Ukraine’s expense is unacceptable.”

Trump’s campaign said Vance’s comments “should not be taken as a specific proposal from President Trump” and that he was “simply talking about concepts that could be part of an overall plan” to end the war .

But when asked if he thought Ukraine should cede land in exchange for ending the war, Vance told NBC News on Wednesday that he wouldn’t rule anything out at this early stage. “Everything is going to be on the table,” he said.

Republicans criticized Zelensky for traveling to a swing state and being seen there alongside Democrats.

“It was a real tactical misstep on Zelensky’s part to show up at that Scranton armory alongside Casey and Cartwright because it looks like he’s joining a re-election scare tour,” said Reid Smith, vice president for foreign policy. to Stand Together, a libertarian nonprofit founded by Charles Koch. “He is at least betting that there will be a Democratic majority in the Senate and that Harris will retain Biden’s mandate when it comes to his Ukraine policy.”

Sen. Bob Casey and Rep. Matt Cartwright, both Democrats, joined Zelensky on the visit to Scranton.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., a Trump ally who helped direct funding for Ukraine through the House, sent a letter to Zelensky ‘demanding that you fire him immediately’ the Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States during the trip to Pennsylvania.

“The facility was in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a high-profile political appointee in Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because – intentionally – no Republican was invited,” Johnson wrote. “The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event intended to help Democrats and clearly constitutes election interference. This short-sighted and intentionally political decision caused Republicans to lose confidence in Ambassador (Oksana) Markarova.”

Johnson has met frequently with Zelenskyy, but he said Wednesday that he was unable to find a time this week due to scheduling conflicts.

Meanwhile, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Biden said the West must maintain its resolve to fight Russian expansionism.

“We can’t get enough of it. We cannot look away and we will not let up our support for Ukraine,” he said.

Harris echoed that message, telling Zelensky in February that “we will be with you as long as it takes.”

Trump has long praised Putin and he pledged to end the war on his first day back in the White House, although he refused to say how or whether he wanted kyiv to win.

“I want the war to stop,” Trump said when pressed during his only debate with Harris. “I want to save lives,” he added, falsely claiming that “millions” of people were dying in the conflict.

A former senior Trump administration official echoed Trump in saying that the circumstances of a future settlement agreement are becoming more tense by the day. “Any diplomatic conversation will not satisfy both sides,” the former official said.

Exactly how Harris would preside over the conflict remains unclear. Its national security team is led by Philip Gordon, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs during the years when the Obama administration sought to engage with Russia more constructively, repairing relations and reversing what Obama had called a “dangerous drift.”

But Harris warned during the debate that without U.S. support for Ukraine, Putin would “stay in kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe,” and she said Trump would simply “abandon” the task to Russia . Democratic critiques of Trump’s stance on Ukraine have often echoed years of suggestions that he was beholden to Putin and unwilling to antagonize him.

“This is not who we are as Americans,” she said before mentioning, in a nod to the electoral issues, the votes of 800,000 Polish Americans in Pennsylvania, a number approximately 10 times that of Biden in 2020 and 20 times that of Trump. margin of victory in 2016.

Poland is one of Russia’s staunchest opponents, and pro-Harris forces have run ads specifically targeting Polish Americans. NBC News had reported that Trump and Polish President Andrzej Duda were scheduled to visit a Catholic shrine together last Sunday, but the trip was canceled for logistical reasons, according to a campaign source familiar with the matter.

But Harris hasn’t offered many details about how she would oversee the war effort as president, especially if congressional Republicans lose the appetite to approve more funding for the country.

Some outside the administration argue that despite the campaign’s fiery rhetoric, Harris could also seek ways to help end the war, amid the harsh political realities that a future Harris administration would face.

“I think they recognize that having a never-ending war on NATO’s eastern flank is not in the enduring interests of the alliance and, frankly, in the American interests either,” said Smith, from Stand Together.