The Uneasy Alliance Between Kamala Harris and Volodymyr Zelensky

In the middle of February 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris flew to Europe for a critical mission on the world stage. Nearly 200,000 Russian troops stood at the borders of Ukraine, and their invasion would mark one of the greatest challenges in decades to the U.S.-led international order. The Biden administration sent Harris to help the Europeans deal with it.

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.

Her trip to Germany in 2022, less than a week before the invasion began, took Harris to an annual gathering of European leaders in Munich. One of her tasks was to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and convey to him how the U.S. intended to react to the invasion—and how it would not. She also would deliver the latest U.S. intelligence assessments and explain the “preparations needed to succeed on the battlefield,” according to a White House official.

The message she delivered was not entirely welcome, and the impression she made on the Ukrainians was mixed. “Kamala Harris said the attack was unavoidable,” recalls Oleksiy Reznikov, who attended the meeting in his role as Ukraine’s defense minister at the time. “What President Zelensky said to that was: I get it. Our intelligence also sees this information.” But he and Harris could not agree on the appropriate response.

Zelensky urged the U.S. to impose preemptive sanctions against Russia, arguing that would force Vladimir Putin to rethink his decision to invade. If the attack was indeed unavoidable, Zelensky argued, the U.S. should flood weapons into Ukraine, including the anti-aircraft systems, fighter jets and heavy artillery needed to prevent Russian forces from overrunning the country.

Harris rejected both suggestions, according to the Ukrainian officials in the room. The U.S. could not impose preemptive sanctions against Russia, they were told, because the 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 clearly asked Kamala Harris: ‘You want me to admit this, but what will that give you? If I admit it here in this conversation, will you impose sanctions?’ And he did not get an answer.”

The U.S. position at the time, set by President Biden in consultation with his national security aides, was that the threat of sanctions was a greater deterrent to Russia than their imposition, and that providing advanced weaponry to Kyiv would likely strengthen Putin's conviction that Ukraine was becoming a client state of NATO. "Vice President Harris has been a strong proponent of enduring U.S. support for Ukraine and has repeatedly expressed an unwavering commitment to support the people of Ukraine as they defend themselves against Russia’s brutal aggression," the White House official says.

Harris's other main role at the conference was to rally European leaders for a united response if the invasion came, and to lay out the U.S. position in a speech. "She met with European leaders to coordinate responses in anticipation of Russia’s invasion," the White House official tells TIME, and in her speech to the conference, "she foreshadowed Russia’s playbook and outlined steps the United States and Europe would take together."

Still, the message she delivered to Zelensky in Munich added to his frustration with his allies ahead of the Russian invasion, and it set the tone for a relationship with Harris that has never been particularly warm. While President Biden and other senior officials in the administration visited Kyiv to show resolve and solidarity with the Ukrainians, Harris has not traveled to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion started. At her meetings with Ukrainian officials in recent years, she did show sympathy for their plight, one of them said, “but I would call it formal sympathy, following protocol.”

Asked about this, the White House official noted that Vice President Harris traveled extensively in her efforts to rally European allies and support the Ukrainians in their war against Russia. Soon after the invasion started, she visited Poland and Romania to meet with European leaders and U.S. military personnel 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 because of his history of direct engagement with Ukraine. After Russia first attacked Ukraine and seized parts of its territory in 2014, Biden took charge of the U.S. response on behalf of the Obama administration, traveling to Kyiv in 2015 to deliver a landmark speech before the Ukrainian parliament. Since the full-scale war began in 2022, the key U.S. officials involved in the U.S. 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—all of whom have made multiple trips to Kyiv during the invasion.

In that crowded field, Vice President Harris has tended to play a supporting role, attending summits and other important gatherings related to the war when Biden was unable to make it. At the Munich Security Conference in 2023, Harris focused on the war crimes Russian troops had 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 says.

Early this summer, Harris also attended the peace summit Ukraine organized in Switzerland. Zelensky’s hope at that gathering was to rally as many world leaders as possible to support his plan for ending the war. Biden declined to attend, citing a fundraiser he needed to headline that week in Hollywood, and Zelensky responded to the snub by criticizing the U.S. President in public: Putin, he said, would “applaud” Biden’s decision not to come.

When Harris arrived in his place, her meeting with Zelensky was marked by some of the same formality as their previous engagements. The two leaders sat directly across from each other at a negotiating table as reporters were led into their meeting room inside an Alpine resort. Zelensky read stiffly from a set of prepared remarks, thanking President Biden and the U.S. Congress for their support. “Putin is trying to expand the war and make it more bloody,” he said. “But together with America and all of our partners we protect the lives of our people.”

In her response, Harris noted that it would be her sixth meeting with Ukraine’s president since the start of the full-scale war. “Not the last,” Zelensky shot back with a smile. “And hopefully in better times,” Harris said.