In mid-February 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris flew to Europe for a critical mission on the world stage. Nearly 200,000 Russian troops remained on Ukraine’s borders, and their invasion would mark one of the biggest challenges in decades to the US-led international order. The Biden administration sent Harris to help the Europeans deal with this.
Like every aspect of Harris’s record, her forays into international affairs have faced renewed scrutiny since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. No threat to U.S. interests in the world has been more immediate during her tenure in the Biden Administration than the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Harris has occasionally played a visible role in the U.S. response.
His trip to Germany in 2022, less than a week before the invasion began, took Harris to an annual meeting of European leaders in Munich. One of his tasks was to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and tell him how the US intended to react to the invasion – and how it would not. She would also deliver the latest US intelligence assessments and explain the “preparations necessary to succeed on the battlefield,” according to a White House official.
The message she conveyed was not entirely welcome and the impression she made on Ukrainians was mixed. “Kamala Harris said the attack was inevitable,” recalls Oleksiy Reznikov, who participated in the meeting as Ukraine’s Defense Minister at the time. “What President Zelensky said was: I understand. Our intelligence also sees this information.” But he and Harris were unable to agree on the appropriate response.
Zelensky urged the US to impose pre-emptive sanctions against Russia, arguing that this would force Vladimir Putin to rethink his decision to invade. If the attack was indeed inevitable, Zelensky argued, the US should flood Ukraine with weapons, including anti-aircraft systems, fighter planes and heavy artillery needed to prevent Russian forces from invading the country.
Harris rejected both suggestions, according to Ukrainian officials present. The US could not impose pre-emptive sanctions against Russia, they were told, because punishment could only come after the crime. Instead of promising to send advanced weapons, Reznikov says the Americans pressured Zelensky to say publicly that the invasion was imminent. “Zelensky pointedly asked Kamala Harris, ‘You want me to admit this, but what will that get you? If I admit it here in this conversation, will you impose sanctions?’ And he got no response.”
The US position at the time, set by President Biden in consultation with his national security advisors, was that the threat of sanctions was a greater deterrent to Russia than their imposition, and that the supply of advanced weaponry to Kiev was likely it would strengthen Putin’s conviction that Ukraine was becoming a NATO client state. “Vice President Harris has been a strong advocate of enduring U.S. support for Ukraine and has repeatedly expressed an unwavering commitment to supporting the people of Ukraine as they defend themselves against Russia’s brutal aggression,” the White House official said.
Harris’s other main role at the conference was to rally European leaders for a united response if the invasion happened, and to lay out the US position in a speech. “She met with European leaders to coordinate responses in anticipation of the Russian invasion,” the White House official told TIME, and in her conference speech, “she foreshadowed the Russia playbook and outlined the steps that U.S. United States and Europe would take it together.”
Still, the message she delivered to Zelensky in Munich increased his frustration with his allies before the Russian invasion and set the tone for a relationship with Harris that was never particularly warm. While President Biden and other senior administration officials have visited Kyiv to show resolve and solidarity with Ukrainians, Harris has not traveled to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began. In her meetings with Ukrainian officials in recent years, she has expressed sympathy for their situation, one said, “but I would call it formal sympathy, following protocol.”
Asked about this, the White House official noted that Vice President Harris has traveled extensively in her efforts to rally European allies and support the Ukrainians in their war against Russia. Shortly after the invasion began, she visited Poland and Romania to meet with European and US military leaders on NATO’s eastern flank “to reinforce our deterrence and defense posture,” the official said.
In dealing with the Zelensky administration, President Biden tended to take the lead, in part due to his history of direct engagement with Ukraine. After Russia first attacked Ukraine and seized parts of its territory in 2014, Biden took command of the US response on behalf of the Obama administration, traveling to Kiev in 2015 to deliver a historic speech before the Ukrainian parliament. Since full-scale war began in 2022, the top US officials involved in the US response have been Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, William Burns, the CIA director, Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, and Lloyd Austin, the secretary. of defense – they all made several trips to Kiev during the invasion.
In this crowded field, Vice President Harris has tended to play a supporting role, participating in summits and other important war-related meetings when Biden was unable to attend. At the 2023 Munich Security Conference, Harris focused on the war crimes that Russian troops committed in Ukraine. “As a former prosecutor, the vice president was an important, credible messenger and rallied the world to hold Russia accountable for its atrocities in Ukraine,” the White House official said.
Earlier this summer, Harris also participated in the peace summit that Ukraine hosted in Switzerland. Zelensky’s hope at that meeting was to bring together as many world leaders as possible to support his plan to end the war. Biden refused to attend, citing a fundraiser that needed to be that week’s Hollywood headline, and Zelensky responded to the snub with criticizing the US president in public: Putin, he said, would “applaud” Biden’s decision not to attend.
When Harris arrived in his place, his meeting with Zelensky was marked by some of the same formalities as his previous engagements. The two leaders sat across from each other at a negotiating table as reporters were ushered into a meeting room at an Alpine resort. Zelensky carefully read a set of prepared remarks, thanking President Biden and the US Congress for their support. “Putin is trying to expand the war and make it bloodier,” he said. “But together with America and all our partners, we protect the lives of our people.”
In her response, Harris noted that it would be her sixth meeting with the president of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale war. “Not the last one,” Zelensky replied with a smile. “And hopefully in better times,” Harris said.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
