Vice President Kamala Harris met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Thursday at the White House, a sign that President Biden’s administration is positioning her to take over a politically fraught diplomatic relationship if she wins the election in November.
The meeting, held shortly after Mr. Biden announced $8 billion worth of military support to the war-torn country, was Ms. Harris’s second this week with a key world leader — even as she runs a presidential campaign focused on domestic issues.
Ms. Harris, who has met with Mr. Zelensky a half-dozen times since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, said at the White House on Thursday that she would “ensure Ukraine prevails in this war,” adding that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “could end the war tomorrow.”
She said the fight in Ukraine “matters to the people of America,” and framed the conflict as one that the American people should recognize as highly consequential.
“The most important moments in our history have come when we stood up to aggressors like Putin,” Ms. Harris said, warning that the Russian leader would not stop with Ukraine, and would possibly even look into encroaching on NATO territory, if he succeeds in his campaign.
”History is so clear in reminding us,” Ms. Harris said, “the United States cannot and should not isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Isolation is not insulation.”
Neither Ms. Harris nor Mr. Zelensky took questions from reporters after about nine minutes of joint remarks.
The vice president is not scheduled to hold any meetings with other major allies before the election, advisers said, the starkest sign yet that she will turn her energy to swing-state barnstorming and focusing on issues that voters have said will decide this election: the economy, abortion and immigration.
But later on Thursday, she is scheduled to deliver Rose Garden remarks about curbing gun violence alongside the president.
Her campaign argues that she has already demonstrated more global leadership as vice president than her Republican opponent in the November election, Donald J. Trump, did as president. Officials pointed to the support she has received from hundreds of national security officials, who said they believed that Mr. Trump posed a threat to national security and democracy.
“Vice President Harris understands that the American people stand on the side of freedom, democracy and rule of law,” Morgan Finkelstein, a national security spokeswoman for Ms. Harris’s campaign, said in a statement. “She knows that if America walks away from Ukraine, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe and our NATO allies.”
For his part, Mr. Trump has focused on domestic and international issues at his campaign events. In a speech on Wednesday in North Carolina that had been forecast as focusing on the economy, Mr. Trump spent much of his time telling supporters that Iran might have been behind the two assassination attempts against him, though U.S. officials have said there is no evidence to link them to Iranian threats.
Mr. Zelensky had requested a meeting with Mr. Trump in addition to meetings at the White House, but so far, the former president has been noncommittal.
At his event on Wednesday, Mr. Trump spent several minutes discussing the war in Ukraine, criticizing Mr. Zelensky for “making little nasty aspersions” about him, and musing aloud that he did not understand why the Ukrainians did not cede territory to the Russian invaders.
“If they made a bad deal, it would’ve been much better,” Mr. Trump said. “They would’ve given up a little bit and everybody would be living and every building would be built and every tower would be aging for another 2,000 years.”
What voters might end up taking away from the dueling events is not much about policy but about the differing personalities of the candidates, said Suzanne Maloney, the vice president and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution.
“There have simply been fewer opportunities to engage in serious reflections around their approach to the world and specific remedies they propose for the tough international challenges,” she said.
And, according to recent polls, foreign policy is not what will drive votes. In a national poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College in early September, just 3 percent of likely voters said foreign policy decisions would influence their vote, compared with 22 percent who said the economy would be a deciding factor, 15 percent who said the same about abortion, and 12 percent who said immigration policy would drive their decision-making.
“Voters typically base their decisions on issues closer to home, especially those policies that impact their pocketbooks,” Ms. Maloney said.
The post Harris Meets With Zelensky, Anticipating a Handover of Global Crises appeared first on New York Times.
