Zelenskyy’s meeting with Harris and spat with Trump reveal a growing partisan divide on Ukraine

Vice President Kamala Harris is meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a trip to the U.S., while former President Donald Trump isn’t, highlighting the growing partisan division over a key foreign policy issue.

Harris is scheduled to meet Thursday with Zelenskyy at the White House. Trump won’t meet with him while he’s in the country this week for the United Nations General Assembly, and he has grown increasingly critical of Zelenskyy, accusing him of having a favorite in the coming election.

“The president of Ukraine is in our country, and he’s making little nasty aspersions toward your favorite president, me,” Trump said Wednesday in North Carolina. “Ukraine is gone. It’s not Ukraine anymore. … Any deal, even the worst deal, would have been better than what we have right now.”

Zelenskyy had implied that he was going to meet with Trump this week, but Trump’s campaign said there had been no formal agreement for a meeting.

Trump has been saying for months, and he has repeated 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 dismissed Zelenskyy as a “great salesman” for securing money for his country who “so badly” wants Democrats to win to keep the money flowing.

“Every time Zelenskyy comes to the United States, he walks away with $100 billion,” Trump said Tuesday in Georgia. “I think he’s the greatest salesman on Earth. But we’re stuck in that war unless I’m president.”

Trump and Zelenskyy have a complicated past. The House impeached Trump in 2019 after details surfaced about a call he made asking Zelenskyy to dig for dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Since the possibility of Trump’s returning to power became more realistic, Zelenskyy has appeared to tread carefully at times when he discusses Trump or responds to his criticism.

Ukraine has mostly enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress since Russia invaded it in 2022. Biden has boosted the effort internationally to rally allies to back Ukraine through what has turned into a long war. But some Republicans have become increasingly skeptical of continued support for the war effort.

Ahead of his meeting with Zelenskyy on Thursday afternoon, Biden said in a statement that the Defense Department would allocate its remaining security assistance for Ukraine by the end of the year and that the department was announcing $2.4 billion in security assistance for the country, providing air 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 $5.5 billion in presidential draw-down authority to fully use the funds Congress appropriated to send U.S. military equipment to Ukraine and replenish U.S. stockpiles.

Harris has said she would continue American support if elected.

Without strong U.S. support, it might be difficult for Ukraine to keep up the fight against Russia.

The partisan divide appeared to grow this week after Zelenskyy visited a munitions factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden’s hometown, which Trump and other Republicans viewed as a signal of which way he wants the November election to go. 

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 “read up on the history of the Second World War” to understand why Russian President Vladimir Putin shouldn’t be appeased.

“My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how,” Zelenskyy added. 

Vance has also come under scrutiny for his suggestions of how to end the war. He floated in a recent podcast interview the possibility of creating a demilitarized zone as part of a “peace settlement” that would include a guarantee of neutrality. 

Zelenskyy said that was tantamount to forcing Ukraine to give up territory to Russia.

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

Trump’s campaign said that Vance’s comments “should not be seen as a specific proposal of President Trump” and that he was simply “speaking to concepts that could be part of a comprehensive plan” to end the war.

But asked whether he believes Ukraine should cede land in exchange for ending the war, Vance told NBC News on Wednesday that he would rule nothing out at this early stage. “Everything is going to be on the table,” he said.

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

“It was a real tactical misstep on Zelenskyy’s part to appear at that Scranton arsenal alongside Casey and Cartwright, because it looks like he’s joining a whistle-stop tour on their re-election,” said Reid Smith, vice president of foreign policy at Stand Together, a nonprofit libertarian organization founded by Charles Koch. “At the very least, he’s wagering that there’s going to be a Democratic majority in the Senate and that Harris will hold on to Biden’s incumbency in terms of her policies vis-à-vis Ukraine.”

Sen. Bob Casey and Rep. Matt Cartwright, both Democrats, joined Zelenskyy at the Scranton visit.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., a Trump ally who has helped shepherd Ukraine funding through the House, sent a letter to Zelenskyy to “demand that you immediately fire” Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S. over the Pennsylvania trip.

“The facility was in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a top political surrogate for Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because — on purpose — no Republicans were invited,” Johnson wrote. “The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference. This shortsighted and intentionally political move has caused Republicans to lose trust in Ambassador [Oksana] Markarova.”

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

Meanwhile, in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Biden said the West must keep up its resolve to fight Russian expansionism.

“We cannot grow weary. We cannot look away, and we will not let up on our support for Ukraine,” he said. 

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

Trump has a long history of praising Putin, and he has vowed to end the war on his first day back in the White House, though he has refused to say how or whether he wants Kyiv to win. 

“I want the war to stop,” Trump when he was pressed during his only debate with Harris. “I want to save lives,” he added, going on to claim falsely that “millions” were dying in the conflict. 

A former senior Trump administration official echoed Trump to say the circumstances of any future settlement deal grow more fraught by the day. “Any diplomatic conversation is not going to be one that both parties will be happy with,” the former official said.

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

But Harris warned in the debate that without U.S. support for Ukraine, Putin “would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe,” and she said Trump would simply “give it up” to Russia. Democratic criticism of Trump’s position on Ukraine has frequently nodded to years of suggestions that he was indebted to Putin and unwilling to cross him.

“That’s not who we are as Americans,” she said before she invoked, in a nod to the electoral stakes, the votes of 800,000 Polish Americans in Pennsylvania, a number roughly 10 times the margin by which Biden won in 2020 and 20 times Trump’s margin of victory in 2016. 

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

But Harris hasn’t detailed many specifics about how she would oversee the war effort as president, especially if Republicans in Congress lose appetite for approving more funds for the country.

Some outside the administration argue that despite the heated rhetoric of the campaign, Harris might also look for ways to help wind down the war amid the stark political realities a future Harris administration would face.

“I think they recognize that having a war without end on NATO’s eastern flank is not in the enduring interests of the alliance or, frankly, the American interest, either,” said Smith, of Stand Together.