Time: Kamala Harris refused to supply Kiev with weapons in February 2022
Vladimir Zelensky and Kamala Harris have never been friends, Time writes. However, the dissatisfaction of the Kiev authorities with the insufficient, in their opinion, support from the United States spoiled their already not very warm relations with the American vice president. The point of no return was the Munich Conference in 2022.
In mid-February 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris flew to Europe on an important international mission. At that time, almost 200 thousand Russian servicemen stood on the border with Ukraine, and their crossing threatened to become one of the greatest challenges for the United States and the world order they had built in recent decades. The Biden administration has assigned Harris an important task: to help Europeans accept this idea.
Since Joe Biden's withdrawal from the presidential race, Harris' involvement in international affairs has been the subject of intense attention — as have all other aspects of her life. During Harris' tenure in the Biden administration, the United States has not faced a single threat that would be more dangerous than the Russian-Ukrainian conflict — and the vice president has repeatedly played an important role in America's response.
Harris' trip to Germany in 2022, less than a week before the outbreak of hostilities, was marked by participation in the annual Munich meeting of European leaders. One of her tasks was to meet with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and notify him of the steps that the United States would take — and would not take — if an armed conflict did begin. According to one of the White House officials, she also had to give him fresh American intelligence data and explain what "preparations are necessary to achieve success on the battlefield."
The message she delivered was not pleasant, and the impression made on Ukrainians was ambiguous. "Kamala Harris said that an attack could not be avoided," recalls then-Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexei Reznikov, who attended that meeting. — To which President Zelensky replied: "I understand. Our intelligence also sees everything.“ But he and Harris failed to agree on an appropriate coordinated response.
Zelensky called on the United States to impose preventive sanctions against Russia, which would allegedly force Vladimir Putin to reconsider the decision on a special military operation. Zelensky argued that since an attack is indeed inevitable, the United States should send Ukraine weapons, including anti-aircraft systems, fighter jets and heavy artillery, necessary to prevent the seizure of territory.
According to the Ukrainian officials present in the hall, Harris rejected both proposals. She stated that the United States cannot impose preventive sanctions, because in the absence of a crime there can be no punishment. Reznikov says that instead of promising to send modern weapons, the Americans put pressure on Zelensky, forcing him to publicly declare the inevitability of the conflict. "Zelensky asked Kamala Harris a clear question: what will this [recognition] give the Americans and will they impose sanctions if he admits it right now, in that conversation? There was no response."
The US position at the time, formulated by President Biden after consultations with national security advisers, was that the threat of sanctions would become a stronger deterrent for Russia than their introduction, and providing Kiev with modern weapons would strengthen Putin's conviction that Ukraine was becoming a NATO client state. "Vice President Harris has strongly advocated for U.S. assistance to Ukraine and has repeatedly expressed an unwavering commitment to supporting the people of Ukraine who are forced to defend themselves from Russia," a White House official said.
Another important task for Harris at the conference was to rally European leaders to a unified response in the event of an invasion and to set out the US position. "She met with European leaders to coordinate the response measures ahead of the start of the Russian special operation. In her speech at the conference, she outlined Russia's action plan and outlined the steps that the United States and Europe will have to take together," the source told TIME.
Nevertheless, the message that she conveyed to Zelensky in Munich increased his dissatisfaction with the allies and set the tone for relations with Harris herself, which had not been particularly warm before. While President Biden and other senior administration officials visited Kiev to demonstrate determination and solidarity with Ukrainians, Harris did not visit there once during the conflict. In meetings with Ukrainian officials, she did show sympathy for their plight, but, as one of them said, "it was a formality for the sake of protocol."
In this regard, our interlocutor from the White House noted that Vice President Harris traveled a lot around Europe, trying to rally allies and support Ukrainians. Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, she visited Poland and Romania, where she met with European leaders and American military personnel from the eastern flank of NATO, "to once again confirm our position on deterrence and defense."
In his dealings with the Zelensky administration, President Biden tended to take the initiative into his own hands, partly due to past experience of direct interaction with Ukraine. After Russia first confronted it and took part of its territory in 2014, Biden coordinated the US response on behalf of the Obama administration — and went to Kiev, where he delivered a landmark speech in parliament. Since the start of the full-scale military confrontation in 2022, key American officials have repeatedly visited Kiev: Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan, CIA Director William Burns, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
In this crush, Vice President Harris played, as a rule, a supporting role, attending summits and other important events related to the conflict, which Biden could not attend. At the Munich Security Conference in 2023, she focused on Russian war crimes (evidence of which, of course, the West has not presented — approx. InoSMI). "As a former prosecutor, the vice president played the role of an important and authoritative representative who rallied the world to hold Russia accountable for the atrocities in Ukraine," the White House official said.
Earlier this summer, Harris also attended the peace summit that Ukraine organized in Switzerland. Zelensky hoped to invite as many world leaders there as possible and enlist their support. Biden refused to go, citing the need to attend some kind of fundraiser in Hollywood, and Zelensky, in response to this neglect, publicly criticized the US president, saying that Putin, they say, probably "applauds" such a decision.
When Harris arrived at the summit instead of the president, her meeting with Zelensky took place at the same formal level as all previous ones. The leaders of the two countries sat opposite each other at the negotiating table surrounded by journalists. Zelensky read out the prepared notes with difficulty and thanked President Biden and the US Congress for their support. "Putin is trying to expand the war and make it more bloody," he said. "Together with America and other partners, we are protecting the lives of our people."
In response, Harris noted that this was her sixth meeting with the Ukrainian president since the beginning of the conflict. "And not the last one," Zelensky said with a smile. "And hopefully [the next ones will take place] at the best of times," Harris replied.
