Zelensky Lands in Contentious U.S. Election Fight

The appearance of partisanship was only underscored by Zelensky’s comments in an interview with the New Yorker, in which he called vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance “too radical.” In February 2022, Vance said he didn’t care what happened to Ukraine “one way or another.” 

Zelensky’s visit and comments have set off former President Donald Trump, who’s taken swipes at the Ukrainian leader during rallies all week. “Every time he comes into the country, he walks away with $60 billion,” Trump said Monday. “He wants [Harris] to win this election so badly.” 

“He’s making nasty little aspersions toward your favorite president, me,” he added on Thursday.

Zelensky’s first few days stateside were likely missteps for a leader who’s already controversial—particularly among Republicans—and is hoping to reinvigorate support for his country’s defense just over a month before a hotly contested U.S. election that could dramatically shift Ukraine’s fate. 

Even as Zelensky was on the ground in the U.S., making his case for a Ukrainian victory, Russian troops were making incremental and steady gains in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. The Institute for the Study of War, which analyzes the war using open-source data, has reported that Russia is making progress toward capturing the town of Vuhledar, which had remained in Ukrainian hands since the beginning of the war. 

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, Zelensky warned leaders that in addition to targeting conventional Ukrainian energy infrastructure—80 percent of which, he said, Russia has destroyed ahead of the cold Eastern European winter—Russian President Vladimir Putin is planning to hit Ukrainian nuclear plants, potentially risking a nuclear meltdown that could affect the continent. 

The Ukrainian president was also apparently using his time in the U.S. to float what he’s calling his “victory plan,” though he’s not yet made the details of the proposal public. Skeptical U.S. officials have reportedly said the plan is ultimately a renewed call for additional weapons and free reign to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles to strike Russian territory, presumably in the hopes that would put Ukraine in a better position to negotiate a diplomatic end to the war. “There can be no favorable diplomatic solution to any problem involving conflict that doesn’t reflect the military realities on the ground,” said retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s national security adviser from 2017 to 2018. There cannot be a negotiated peace “until Putin believes he’s losing,” he added. “Not until Ukraine can regain enough of their territory such that it’s acceptable to them.”      

Ukraine has used home-grown drones to carry out long-range attacks on Russian munitions depots in recent weeks—the kind of strike for which Zelensky wants to use Western precision weapons. Currently, the U.S. and other Western nations that have supplied such weapons have restricted their use to just inside Russian territory, to prevent Russian troops from having a staging ground for their offensives in an effective safe haven. 

The Biden administration—as it has with previous provisions of weapons and capabilities—has resisted giving Ukraine a license for the deep strikes on the grounds that Putin would see the move as escalatory. Earlier this month, President Joe Biden seemed to indicate that perhaps lifting geographic restrictions on the use of Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) in Russia was in the offing—though no such announcement materialized Thursday when Zelensky and Biden met at the White House.

On Wednesday, seemingly in an effort to preempt such an announcement, Putin said he was lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. Moscow now considers “aggression against Russia by any nonnuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state”—a clear reference to Ukraine and the Western countries backing it—a pretext for the use of nuclear weapons. Likewise, any “critical threat to our sovereignty” through conventional warfare could be a justification to deploy nukes under the new doctrine. 

The Kursk offensive, now almost two months old, meets those conditions—though the Kremlin’s reaction to Ukrainian troops seizing Russian territory was chaotic, belated, and ultimately muted. “We should separate—as much as possible—doctrine from facts, on the grounds that it is a means for Russia to conduct war by intimidating and preventing or slowing us in our reactivity in support of Ukraine,” Iulia Joja, the director of the Black Sea program at the Middle East Institute, told TMD. 

Though Zelensky didn’t walk away from his meeting with Biden on Thursday with a permission slip to use long-range missiles, the U.S. president did authorize additional weapons deliveries from existing U.S. stockpiles to the tune of $5.5 billion—funds appropriated in the spring supplemental funding package that would have expired on September 30, because their extension wasn’t included in Wednesday’s continuing resolution. In one of the largest drawdowns in months, the U.S. will provide a refurbished Patriot missile system as well as Joint Standoff Weapons, glide bombs fired by F-16s that can travel up to 70 miles. These weapons could be delivered in weeks or months. 

In what seems to be an effort to insulate aid to Ukraine as much as possible from a potential second Trump administration, Biden said Thursday his administration would allocate all of the appropriated funds by the end of his term in January—though there will likely be a renewed fight for additional appropriations after the election. 

And Trump has certainly presented a complicated view of what his election would mean for Ukraine’s future. The former president has flip-flopped on support to Ukraine since the beginning of the war, though his administration did provide Kyiv with Javelin missile systems in 2017 before Russia launched its full-scale invasion. 

He’s frequently claimed he could end the war in a day, though during this month’s presidential debate he refused to say whether he wanted Ukraine to win. He’s also accused Biden and Harris of causing and perpetuating the conflict by arming Ukraine. “Any deal—the worst deal—would’ve been better than what we have now,” Trump said Thursday in a speech from North Carolina. 

Trump’s running mate on Thursday described his preferred outcome, which would see Ukraine partitioned: Russia would keep the land it illegally seized and the two would establish a demilitarized zone along the current front lines. Ukraine would be forced into neutrality—no entry into NATO or the European Union. 

“There are some in my country who would instead force Ukraine to give up large parts of its sovereign territory, who would demand that Ukraine accept neutrality, and would require Ukraine to forgo security relationships with other nations,” Harris said Thursday during a joint appearance with Zelensky, responding to Vance’s proposal. “These proposals are the same as those of Putin and let us be clear, they are not proposals for peace. Instead, they are proposals for surrender, which is dangerous and unacceptable.” 

One plan from a pro-Trump think tank—developed in part by another former national security adviser to Trump, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, and presented to the former president—would have the U.S. compel Putin and Zelensky to the table by, for the former, threatening to arm Ukraine to the teeth, and for the latter, threatening to withhold aid to Kyiv. “The problem with that is that it misframes the intentions of both parties,” McMaster told TMD. “On the Russian side, Putin is not going to stop. And this would give him the opportunity to regenerate the combat power that he’s lost. You know the casualties on both sides are staggering, but I think Russia could be meeting a breaking point.”

McMaster said he favored providing Ukraine with everything it needs—including permission to use U.S. weapons for long-range strikes on Russian military targets—to put Putin on the back foot. “And then I think, again, maybe there’s a ceasefire at some point from a position of [Ukrainian] strength,” he said. 

“I think President Trump got this on a number of occasions and then lost the idea,” McMaster told TMD, pointing to Trump’s 2017 promise to go after the Taliban militarily before the U.S. would consider negotiation. “He understood that there’s a time for talking and time for action, and that really it is about the situation you go into any kind of negotiation with.”

After much will-they-won’t-they, Trump said Thursday that he will meet with Zelensky today. “If they made a bad deal it would’ve been much better,” Trump said Thursday. “[Ukraine] would’ve given up a little bit and everybody would be living.” 

• Writing for the Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs explored how one of Montesquieu’s lesser-known works, Persian Letters, offers a helpful method for navigating political differences. “In American political discourse today, anyone who sees problems with our two dominant political parties will immediately and loudly be accused of ‘both-sidesism,’” Jacobs wrote. “But that charge is built on the double assumption that (a) there are only two sides and (b) we must choose one of them.” Persian Letters demonstrates how binary thinking can give way to the wisdom of triangulation, Jacobs argued. “It is only through triangulation that one can accurately assess the claims of a particular tradition; which is to say, it is not enough even to know one other religion, or civilization—or language, for that matter,” he wrote. “The more points we can plot in the field of our perception, the richer and denser will be our understanding. This does not mean that we will see one choice as good as another, but rather that we will make our own choices (even when we choose to remain securely embedded within our inherited tradition) with more wisdom and insight.”  
• While Eric Adams is the first sitting New York City mayor ever to be indicted on criminal charges, the Big Apple has a long tradition of suspect behavior emanating from the mayor’s office, argued Clyde Haberman, the New York Times’ former city hall bureau chief. “Ethical breaches and New York City Hall have gone hand in hand for so long that it’s almost as if you can’t have one without the other,” he wrote. “You have to go way, way back—to the days of the secular saint Fiorello La Guardia—to come up with a New York mayor unencumbered by enough baggage to sink an ocean liner. Why this is so is open to debate. It may well be that in a city that is the nation’s financial, media and fashion capital, the best and the brightest find local politics a less-than-worthy pursuit; there are so many other ways to make money and a name for oneself. It is also possible, in a city whose principal defining endeavor has been the pursuit of wealth as far back as when it was called New Amsterdam, that political exigencies and human frailty almost inevitably lead even well-meaning politicians down perilous rabbit holes.” 

New York Times: The R.N.C. Asked a Conspiracy Theorist to Train Poll Watchers. Here’s What He Told Them 

A few years ago, Jack Posobiec was a fringe figure and a right-wing agitator best known for helping spread “Pizzagate,” a conspiracy theory about Democrats running a satanic child abuse ring underneath a Washington pizza parlor. This month, he was invited by the Republican National Committee to speak to a group of volunteers about how to monitor elections in Michigan.  

…  

The key to elections, he said, is that “it doesn’t matter who votes. It matters who counts the votes.”

CNN: Study Asked 10 And 11-Year-Olds About Trump And Harris. These Are The Themes That Came Out 

Interviewer: “What’s the first word that pops into your head when you hear the name Kamala Harris?” 

Fourth grader: “Liar” 

Interviewer: “What’s the first word that pops into your head when you hear Donald Trump?” 

Different fourth grader: “Pure evil.”

The first season of The Last of Us ended rather brutally and abruptly (spoilers!!!), leaving some viewers previously unacquainted with the video game series’ storyline feeling ambivalent. But we’d be lying if we told you the season two trailer didn’t pull us right back in. 

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew reported from Michigan on J.D. Vance’s campaigning in the state, Scott explored how government policy has contributed to the death of the starter home, Nick examined (🔒) why the presidential race is as close as it is, and Will recounted the personal impact of medical innovations. 
• On the podcasts: Sarah and David examine the evidence in the case of executed prisoner Marcellus Williams on Advisory Opinions. Plus: Sarah, Jonah, and David take to The Dispatch Podcast for a Dispatch/Left, Right & Center crossover. 
• On the site: Charlotte reports on whether the third Lebanon war has begun, and Kevin takes a look at what the inauguration of the new Mexican president might mean for the country’s relationship with the United States.

How should the war in Ukraine end?