Zelenskyy visits White House as partisan divide grows ahead of US vote

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was meeting with US President Joe Biden at the White House, and was later set to meet with Democratic presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris, in a flurry of diplomacy ahead of the United States election in November.

The series of Washington, DC meetings on Thursday come as the Ukrainian leader has sought to shore up support for continued US military aid to his embattled country, regardless of who wins the vote in November.

Biden and Harris have both pledged that continued support, while the Republican candidate, former US President Donald Trump, and several vocal members of his party have continually called it into question.

“The United States will provide Ukraine with the support it needs to win this war,” Biden said in a statement on Thursday ahead of his White House meeting with Zelenskyy.

Biden further pledged to ensure that all funding so far approved for Ukraine is disbursed before he leaves office in January 2025, in what he described as a “surge in security assistance” totalling nearly $8bn.

He vowed to convene a meeting with other world leaders focused on Ukraine’s defence during a visit to Germany next month. However, he stopped short of greenlighting Ukraine’s longstanding request to fire US-made long-range missiles into Russia.

Later, speaking from the Oval office next to Zelenskyy, Biden said his administration was “making clear that we stand with Ukraine now and in the future”.

Zelenskyy, in turn, thanked Biden for his support and said it was important to secure Ukraine’s future in the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

That came a day after Ukrainian leader, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, again dismissed the notion that Ukraine would accept ceding any territory to Russia as part of a peace plan, while warning of an increasing nuclear threat from Moscow.

Zelenskyy urged global leaders not to seek “an out” that falls short of “real, just peace”. Ukrainian forces, backed by billions of dollars in Western military aid, have largely halted Russia’s offensive in the country’s southwest, while launching their own incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.

Still, entrenched fighting along the front lines shows no signs of abating, and Kyiv has increasingly pushed for permission to use Western weapons to strike deeper into Russia.

Following the meeting with Biden on Thursday, Zelenskyy will meet and then hold a joint news conference with Harris. The Biden administration has increasingly sought to forefront Harris’s foreign policy credentials since she took over as presidential candidate after Biden dropped out of the race in July.

During a debate against Trump earlier this month, Harris charged: “If Donald Trump were president, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now”.

Partisan divide grows

Zelenskyy has received a far less warm welcome from Republicans during his trip to the US.

His already fraught relationship with Trump was further strained this week, with the Ukrainian leader criticising Trump’s campaign boast that he could quickly negotiate a resolution to Russia’s invasion, which began in February 2022.

In an interview published earlier this week in the magazine The New Yorker, Zelenskyy said “My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how.”

He also criticised Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, as “too radical” for suggesting that Ukraine ceding land should not be taken off the table in efforts to reach a ceasefire.

Speaking at a campaign rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, Trump struck out at Zelenskyy for “making nasty little dispersions toward” him.

He went on to lay the blame for the continuation of the war on Zelenskyy, saying he “refused to make a deal” and that even a “bad deal” involving giving up “a little bit” would have ended the bloodshed.

Meanwhile, Republican House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson has also made political hay after Zelenskyy on Wednesday toured a Pennsylvania munitions factory with Democratic state Governor Josh Shapiro, who has been a top surrogate for the Harris campaign.

Pennsylvania is expected to be a key state in deciding the US election, and has a large Ukrainian and eastern European population supportive of Washington’s backing of Kyiv.

Johnson said the visit was “designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference”. He called for Zelenskyy to fire his ambassador to the US.

The House speaker was among several House Republicans who earlier this year blocked further aid to Ukraine, before eventually relenting.

Zelenskyy was not expected to meet with Trump or Johnson during his US trip, although he was set to meet with several other Republican congressional leaders.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies