Zelensky Lands in Contentious U.S. Election Fight

Happy Friday! The great bovine escape of 2024 came to an end earlier this week when the last of the eight bulls who broke loose from a rodeo in Massachusetts on Sunday was captured. That’s what happens when you run a rodeo in the Northeast instead of in the South, as God intended. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday met with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and congressional leaders, urging U.S. officials to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles to strike targets within Russia. Zelensky told a bipartisan group of senators that he could force Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table if America increases the speed of weapons shipments and approves strikes on Russian territory. Biden announced a roughly $8 billion military aid package—of previously appropriated funds—for Ukraine ahead of his meeting with Zelensky.   
• In joint remarks with Zelensky ahead of their meeting, Harris backed the Ukrainian president’s recent criticisms of Sen. J.D. Vance’s outline of a settlement to the conflict. The Republican vice presidential nominee’s plan would entail Russia keeping the territory it has seized in its invasion and Ukraine abiding by a “neutrality” stipulation that would prevent it from joining Western military alliances. “These proposals are the same as those of Putin,” Harris said. “They are not proposals for peace. Instead, they are proposals for surrender.” 
• The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck more than 200 Hezbollah targets in Lebanon with airstrikes on Thursday. The strikes followed Israeli officials distancing themselves from a U.S. and France-backed ceasefire proposal announced on Wednesday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office released a statement early Thursday saying the Israeli leader has “not even responded to” the proposal and that he “has directed the IDF to continue fighting with full force,” though he later reversed course and stated that “Israel shares the aims” of the U.S. plan. Hezbollah attacks on Israeli civilian centers continued overnight, including rocket fire on the country’s third-most populous city of Haifa. Meanwhile, the IDF said it had intercepted a ballistic missile from Yemen after the Houthis—another Iranian-backed terrorist group—launched the projectile toward Tel Aviv early Friday morning, triggering air raid sirens for millions of people across central Israel. 
• Department of Defense officials reportedly confirmed for the first time that China’s newest nuclear-powered attack submarine sank earlier this year at a shipyard in the city of Wuhan. The Wall Street Journal first reported the sinking earlier on Thursday. Chinese officials have not commented on the reports, and it’s unclear if the vessel sank with nuclear fuel onboard. 
• The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) launched an offensive on Thursday against the militia group the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the capital of Khartoum. Both sides have vied for control of the capital since the civil war broke out in April 2023, but the RSF had held most of the city for months. Yesterday’s attack seems to be the first major operation by the SAF in months. The renewed fighting threw more cold water on already-stalled talks for a ceasefire and humanitarian aid access that officials tried to revive during the United Nations General Assembly this week. 
• Prosecutors on Thursday unsealed the charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams after the FBI seized additional electronic devices from Adams’ residence early Thursday morning. The 57-page indictment outlined nearly a decade of alleged bribes and perks that Adams took from foreign business interests and Turkish officials. Prosecutors allege that after Adams became Brooklyn borough president in 2014, he “sought and accepted” improper perks including luxury international travel in excess of $100,000 as well as illegal foreign campaign contributions. The indictment accuses Adams of financing his 2021 campaign through such illegal contributions and of planning to do the same for his reelection campaign next year. Adams has continued to deny the allegations even as more New York Democratic officials called for him to step down on Thursday. 
• Hurricane Helene made landfall in northwest Florida as a Category 4 storm Thursday night, battering the southeast United States with heavy rainfall and sustained winds of 140 mph before weakening to a Category 1 hurricane early Friday morning. At least three people have been killed as a result of the storm, which caused flooding and power outages across multiple states. “When Floridians wake up tomorrow morning, we’re going to be waking up to a state where very likely there’s been additional loss of life and certainly there’s going to be loss of property,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday night. 

Endgame in Ukraine 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had only been in the U.S. a few hours before he stepped right in the middle of a fraught presidential election. 

On Sunday, his first day in the country, he visited a munitions factory that makes essential 155 mm rounds. The kicker? The plant is in Pennsylvania, the presidency’s must-win state. Plus, he visited with prominent Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, a strong backer of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. 

Critics—in both good faith and bad—argued the move smacked too much of election interference by a foreign leader. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson went so far on Wednesday as to call for Zelensky to remove the Ukrainian ambassador who arranged the visit, and House Republicans opened an investigation into the tour. 

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 rein 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.” 

Worth Your Time

• 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.” 

Presented Without Comment

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.”

Also Presented Without Comment

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.”

In the Zeitgeist 

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. 

Toeing the Company Line

• 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.

Let Us Know

How should the war in Ukraine end?