Ukrainian leader's rude awakening: In Washington, his country's destiny is a bargaining chip
CBC
A U.S. senator looked at Ukraine's president in a meeting and informed him: This problem is nothing personal.
He was referring to the potential expiry of American military support — tens of billions of dollars' worth of weapons transfers — that has sustained Ukraine's self-defence for nearly two years against Russian forces.
"It's got nothing to do with you," Republican Lindsey Graham told Volodymyr Zelenskyy, attempting to reassure him during his Washington tour Tuesday.
"You've done everything anybody could ask of you."
It's caught up, he explained, in a domestic American dispute. It's the poisoned politics of migration, which now risks killing a security bill lumping together funding for Ukraine, Israel and the southern U.S. border.
Meanwhile, military aid for Ukraine runs out in a couple of weeks, leading defence analysts to predict the country at war with Russia would be lucky simply to hold the territory it already has.
Zelenskyy left town without any commitments.
It was not the celebratory welcome he received just a year ago on his first Washington visit. This time, Zelenskyy was subjected to insults on social media from Donald Trump Jr. and from the head of a Trump-aligned political committee who called him an "ass" for not wearing a suit.
So is the funding package dead? Not necessarily.
The dimmest glimmer of optimism emerged from a late-afternoon meeting on Capitol Hill, which unfolded while Zelenskyy was across town meeting President Joe Biden.
At the Capitol, a few Democratic and Republican senators met with White House staff and secretary of homeland security in an effort to find some sort of migration compromise.
While leaving the meeting, top Democratic negotiator Chris Murphy said, "We made progress." Kirsten Sinema, a former centrist Democrat that is now Independent, concurred — calling it "substantive progress."
What's left to be determined is whether that progress winds up overcoming four towering political obstacles.
One is getting a deal with the necessary bipartisan votes to pass the Senate. Then, can it pass the far more conservative Republican-led House? It will need Democratic votes, but how many will be lost in a progressive backlash? And, finally, can this happen before a looming deadline as Congress departs this week for its holiday break? Ukraine funds could run out during the holidays.
The United States is telling its citizens to leave Iran, as Washington maintains its pressure on Tehran to cease its crackdown on protesters and U.S. President Donald Trump threatens to strike the Iranian government over the issue.
U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States may meet Iranian officials and was in contact with the opposition as he weighed a range of strong responses, including military options, to a violent crackdown on Iranian protests, which pose one of the biggest challenges to clerical rule since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
A crackdown on nationwide protests in Iran has killed at least 538 people and even more are feared dead, activists said Sunday, while Tehran warned that the U.S. military and Israel would be "legitimate targets" if America uses force to protect demonstrators.
For years, many of Venezuela’s exiles in Spain — leading opposition figures and citizens — have hoped for a day when ousted president Nicolás Maduro would no longer be in power.
The U.S. attack on Venezuela has shifted the ground for guerrilla groups operating across the country's borderlands with Colombia, raising fears of possible betrayal by Venezuelan regime officials, while opening the door to a wider conflict should U.S. boots ever hit the ground, local security experts say.
Protests sweeping across Iran neared the two-week mark on Saturday, with the country’s government acknowledging the ongoing demonstrations despite an intensifying crackdown and as the Islamic Republic remains cut off from the rest of the world.
Russia didn’t just use a hypersonic missile to target a site in western Ukraine near the border with Poland, in the European Union, but high ranking officials then went on to boast about the power of the nuclear-capable weapon, in what some saw as a clear warning to the West.
The official White House narrative of how a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed a U.S. citizen in her vehicle in Minneapolis is bumping hard up against what can be seen in videos of the incident.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot and killed a Minneapolis motorist on Wednesday during the Trump administration's latest immigration crackdown on a major American city — a shooting that federal officials claimed was an act of self-defence but that the city's mayor described as "reckless" and unnecessary.
When Marco Rubio took the lectern at Mar-a-Lago shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced the country had captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, it was the culmination of a decade of effort from the secretary of state and a clear sign that he had emerged as a leading voice within the Trump administration.
The catchphrase going into Tuesday's coalition of the willing meeting on Ukraine in Paris appears to be: expect the unexpected.
Deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro pleaded not guilty on terrorism and drug-trafficking charges during his first appearance in a New York court on Monday.
The leaders of Denmark and Greenland on Sunday urged U.S. President Donald Trump to stop threatening to take over Greenland, after he reiterated his wish to do so in an interview with The Atlantic magazine.