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*As Harvard President Faces Pressure to Resign, Some Faculty Show Support*
Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, faced rising pressure after her answers to questions about antisemitism. Some faculty members signed a petition supporting her.
The president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, faced escalating pressure on Sunday to resign as prominent alumni, donors and politicians called for her ouster. But a group of faculty members rallied to support her, arguing that she was being railroaded for a moment of poorly worded remarks about antisemitism.
The body that could ultimately decide Dr. Gay’s fate, the Harvard Corporation, is scheduled to meet on Monday.
As critics of Dr. Gay doubled down, an effort was underway to save her job. As of Sunday evening, more than 500 members of the Harvard faculty had signed a petition urging “in the strongest possible terms” to “resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom.” Harvard has about 2,300 faculty members.
Dr. Gay has apologized for her remarks before a congressional committee last Tuesday, which she acknowledged were inadequate.
“I am sorry,” Dr. Gay said in an interview that the campus newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, published on Friday. “When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret,” she said. Dr. Gay is the first Black woman to lead Harvard and took on the role less than six months ago.
As her position grew increasingly tenuous, the fallout from last week’s hearing deepened. Late Saturday, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, M. Elizabeth Magill, resigned. And calls from donors for the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sally Kornbluth, to step aside also grew louder.
The eruption over Dr. Gay’s remarks came after she seemed to equivocate before Congress when she was asked whether university policies forbade calling for the genocide of Jewish people.
“One down. Two to go,” said Representative Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican who led some of the most pointed questioning during the hearing, when all three presidents strained to answer how their universities would handle incidents of antisemitism. Ms. Stefanik, a graduate of Harvard, said on the social media site X that the resignation of Ms. Magill was “the bare minimum of what is required.”
Representatives for some of the most prominent Harvard Corporation members declined to comment. Dr. Gay declined to comment through a Harvard spokesman.
Within the last several days, Congressional Republicans have opened an investigation into the three institutions and major donors have threatened to rescind multimillion-dollar gifts — a rapid turn of events that has stunned academia and emboldened critics of elite universities who argue that campuses are not confronting antisemitic rhetoric in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza.
It was during the proceeding on Capitol Hill last week that Ms. Stefanik hammered the three presidents with questions that precipitated the current controversy. Ms. Stefanik said that in campus protests, students had chanted support for intifada, an Arabic word that means uprising and that many Jews hear as a call for violence against them.
“At Harvard,” Ms. Stefanik asked Dr. Gay, “does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?”
*Israel Says Strikes Are Targeting Three Hamas Strongholds*
The Israeli military said it had taken control of the area surrounding the former headquarters of Hamas in Gaza City, and that its forces were engaged in intense battles in three areas of the Gaza Strip where it said the group still had “strongholds,” including in the south, where the United Nations has warned of an increasingly perilous humanitarian situation.
The Israeli military now controls the area in Gaza City surrounding Palestine Square, home to municipal offices and the headquarters for Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in the enclave, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said at a news conference late Sunday.
Israeli forces are now focused, he said, on fighting in three areas: Jabaliya and Shajaiye, two neighborhoods in northern Gaza, and in Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza.
Jabaliya, a densely populated area just north of Gaza City, has been struck relentlessly by Israeli forces since the first weeks of the war, including with at least two 2,000-pound bombs during one airstrike last month, according to a New York Times analysis. Israeli troops have also targeted Shajaiye, a residential area, since the start of their ground invasion in late October.
Israel has yet to find Mr. Sinwar, whom they believe is hiding in southern Gaza, and officials said last week that Israeli forces had surrounded his house in the Khan Younis region, although his location was unknown. Admiral Hagari said that capturing or killing him is still a goal of the war, which has entered its third month.
The director of Israel’s national security council, Tzahi Hanegbi, has rejected the idea that the lives of Mr. Sinwar and other top Hamas leaders could be spared if they went into exile outside Gaza — as Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, did in 1982 during a war between Israel and Lebanon.
“I believe that Sinwar isn’t a partner for a model of that kind,” Mr. Hanegbi told Israel’s Channel 12 in an interview that aired this past weekend. “But if we kill him, which is the intention, the leadership that succeeds him might understand that in order to be spared his fate it needs to leave the Gaza Strip humiliated, but at least to save its life.”
Israel has been conducting aerial and ground attacks on Gaza since Oct. 7, the day that Hamas-led attacks killed 1,200 people in Israel, according to Israeli officials. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans have fled to the southern part of the enclave, to zones that the Israeli military said would be safe.
Instead, Gazans have struggled to find cover and security as Israel has expanded the war. Already displaced, tens of thousands of people in and around Khan Younis have moved to areas near Rafah on the border with Egypt, heeding the latest warnings from Israel to evacuate.
The availability of shelter, food and medical treatment near Rafah is collapsing, stirring fears of a potential mass displacement into Egypt, United Nations officials warned on Sunday. The Gazans who have arrived in Rafah have only found more death, hunger and desperation. At least 15,000 people, and possibly thousands more, have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the health authorities there.
On Saturday, Admiral Hagari said videos that had appeared on social media in recent days of men in their underwear, some kneeling, as they surrendered in northern Gaza, had not been distributed by the Israeli military. He confirmed that the images were of men who had been detained in Jabaliya and Shajaiye. After Israeli forces searched them, Admiral Hagari said, “dozens who are terrorists” were arrested, while the rest were released. He declined to elaborate.
The smoldering tensions inflamed across the Middle East by the war in Gaza are intensifying, after Israel warned that skirmishes along the Lebanese border could not continue and the Houthi militia in Yemen made good on threats to step up its attacks against shipping in the Red Sea.
The chief of staff of Israel’s military, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, said on a visit to the northern border with Lebanon that continued violence by the powerful Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia risked pushing his forces to make “very clear change” in the confrontation.
*The Theological Truth We Must Press During War*
I am ordained, but I do not pastor a church. Still, I am often invited to be a guest speaker or lecturer in congregations and universities. Lately, when people ask me questions afterward, they want to know my opinion about the war between Israel and Hamas. I am happy to answer them. Members of the clergy aren’t shut off from the world, and I don’t think our words should be either — we can be a force for good.
The United States is a better nation because of the work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s resistance to apartheid helped transform South Africa.
The church has also known deep failure. Christianity’s dark history of antisemitism spanned centuries. And my family has personal experience with a different strain of evil, as I am a descendant of enslaved persons owned by Christian ministers.
And yet, history unfolds before us, giving properly humbled churches chances to begin again. We are at such a moment with the war in Gaza. So if our congregants want to know what we think about the war that began with Hamas’s terrorist attacks, what is the appropriate response? How might churches engage with a complex history that has so many competing claims?
The fraught history of the Middle East may seem to be beyond the expertise of most clergy members. The standard preparatory divinity degrees focus on things such as understanding biblical texts, articulating theology and creating programs to care for the poor. Most pastors counsel parents and struggling couples, not presidents and prime ministers.
Church work may seem like poor preparation for analyzing international politics, but it is actually what makes members of the clergy useful in this moment. We claim to answer to a higher calling than the needs of any particular nation-state. Our concerns are free to range widely, since we know that empathy need not be bound by any political borders.
A central teaching of Christianity arising from Genesis, a text it shares with its Jewish neighbors, maintains that every person, regardless of country of origin, is made in the image of God and deserving of respect. We are not alone in this belief. Other religious and secular traditions have articulated a similar idea. This provides an opportunity for cooperation. The belief in the inestimable worth of human beings can be a moral anchor in the turbulent seas of conflicting concerns.
There is no more crucial time to press this basic truth than in times of war, when the humanity of one’s opponents gets tossed to the side. Contending for the dignity of Palestinian and Israeli civilians is a theological act when the goals of victory and of the protection of the innocent struggle with each other for supremacy. Giving equal value to human beings on both sides of the conflict does not entail making moral equivalences between Israel and Hamas. It requires considering the lives of noncombatants in Israel and Gaza as equally sacred.
George Zabelka was a Catholic chaplain for the United States Air Force during World War II. While stationed on Tinian Island, he ministered to the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, giving them his blessing before the attack. He realized his tragic error when he was forced to face the loss of civilian life those bombs caused. He thought to himself, “My God, what have we done?”
Why had he supported the bombing? He explained, “I was told it was necessary — told openly by the military and told implicitly by my church’s leadership.” During a time of war, Father Zabelka felt pressured to trade in his religious principles (love for enemies and mercy toward those who suffer) and instead think of his own “side.”
During the Vietnam War, Dr. King saw the tremendous danger of sacrificing morals for pragmatics. After reflecting on the tremendous loss of innocent life in Vietnam, he said: “The casualties of principles and values are equally disastrous and injurious. Indeed, they are ultimately more harmful because they are self-perpetuating. If the casualties of principle are not healed, the physical casualties will continue to mount.”
After the horrible events of Oct. 7, over 2,000 evangelical leaders issued a statement correctly condemning the actions of Hamas. They asserted Israel’s right to self-defense and affirmed that the people of the Middle East had “dignity and personhood,” but that statement did not speak explicitly about how that personhood ought to affect the conduct of the war. I would have liked to see the group outline how the humanity of all those involved places moral limits on military actions during wartime.
*Why Biden Should Make an Immigration Deal With Republicans*
Over the last few months, the incredulous question — How can Donald Trump possibly be leading the polls; there must be some mistake — has given way to the clear reality: Something in American life would need to change for Joe Biden to be favored for re-election in November 2024.
The good news for Biden is that it’s easy to imagine developments that would help his re-election bid. Notwithstanding a fashionable liberal despair about how bad vibes are deceiving Americans about the state of the economy, there’s plenty of room for improvements — in inflation-adjusted wages, interest rates, the stock market — that could sweeten the country’s economic mood. (Just sustaining the economic trajectory of the last few months through next summer would almost certainly boost Biden’s approval ratings.)
The looming Trump trials, meanwhile, promise to refocus the country’s persuadable voters on what they dislike about the former president; that, too, has to be worth something in the swing states where Biden is currently struggling.
In both those cases, though, the president doesn’t have much control over events. No major economic package is likely to pass Congress, and whatever influence you think his White House did or didn’t exert over Trump’s indictments, Biden staffers won’t be supervising jury selection.
There is an issue that’s hurting Biden, however, where the Republican Party is (officially, at least) quite open to working with the president, provided that he’s willing to break with his own party’s interest groups: the security of the southern border, where Border Patrol apprehensions remain stubbornly high even as the president’s approval ratings on immigration sit about 30 points underwater.
There is a commonplace interpretation of the immigration debate that treats the unpopularity of an uncontrolled border primarily as an optics problem: People are happy enough to have immigrants in their own communities, but they see border disorder on their television screens and it makes them fearful about government incompetence. Sometimes this interpretation comes packaged with the suggestion that the people who worry most about immigration are rural voters who rarely see a migrant in real life, as opposed to liberal urbanites who both experience and appreciate diversity.
The last year or so of blue-city immigration anxiety has revealed the limits of this interpretation: Place enough stress on New York or Chicago, and you will get demands for immigration control in even the most liberal parts of the country.
But really, there’s never been good reason to think that immigration anxiety only manifests itself telescopically, among people whose main exposure to the trend is alarmist Fox News chyrons.
Consider a new paper from Ernesto Tiburcio and Kara Ross Camarena, respectively a Tufts University economics Ph.D and a Defense Department analyst, which uses Mexican-government ID data to track the flow of Mexican migrants into counties in the United States, and finds that exposure to immigrants increases conservatism among natives. As the migrant flow goes up, so does the vote for Republicans in House elections: “A mean inflow of migrants (0.4 percent of the county population) boosts the Republican Party vote share in midterm House elections by 3.9 percentage points.” And the inflow also shifts local policy rightward, reducing public spending and shifting money toward law enforcement as opposed to education.
This suggests that a pro-immigration liberalism inevitably faces a balancing act: High rates of immigration make native voters more conservative, so a policy that’s too radically open is a good way to elect politicians who prefer the border closed.
You can see this pattern in U.S. politics writ large. The foreign-born population in the United States climbed through the Obama presidency, to 44 million from 38 million, and as a share of the overall population it was nearing the highs of the late 19th and early 20th century — a fact that almost certainly helped Donald Trump ride anti-immigration sentiment to the Republican nomination and the presidency.
Then under Trump there was some stabilization — the foreign-born population was about the same just before Covid-19 hit as it had been in 2016 — which probably help defuse the issue for Democrats, increase American sympathy for migrants, and make Biden’s victory possible. But since 2020 the numbers are rising sharply once again, and the estimated foreign-born share of the American population now exceeds the highs of the last great age of immigration. Which, again unsurprisingly, has pushed some number of Biden voters back toward Trump.
*For Palestinians, the Future Is Being Bulldozed*
The men came alone that morning, leaving families and sheep behind, and climbed the hill to see what was left of their village. On the sun-bleached crest, they found a scene of wreckage: The windows of the makeshift clinic had been smashed, household furniture lay shattered; sections of the schoolhouse had been burned to ash. There were drifts of clothing and stray shoes spread on the ground throughout the abandoned village, small things dropped in haste when the families fled.
The Palestinians who live (or lived) in this hilltop hamlet had decamped in terror a few weeks earlier. A gang of Israeli settlers — their neighbors — had been tormenting them for weeks, they explained, beating them up and threatening murder if they didn’t leave.
Similar scenes are playing out across the West Bank these days as Israeli settlers, backed and sometimes aided by soldiers, force Arabs out of villages, farmlands and herding pastures. Human rights monitors say they are documenting an apparently coordinated campaign to bring vast swaths of land under the control of Jewish settlements (all of which are illegal under international law, and some of which are also illegal under Israeli law) while forcing Palestinians into densely populated cities and towns.
I was visiting the occupied territory that morning late last month for the first time since reporting here two decades ago. Insofar as one can still traverse the increasingly checkpoint-choked and claustrophobic West Bank, I’d been roaming around talking with Palestinians and trying to speak with settlers, who tended to rebuff conversation. Statehood has long been promised to Palestinians and is still invoked by U.S. officials in increasingly hollow platitudes. But what land remains for Palestinians, what rights do Palestinians have, what possibilities for collective betterment — indeed, what future — can Palestinians see?
It’s not a revelation to suggest that the dream of a Palestinian state, rooted in the West Bank, may turn out to be something we just talked about while a harder destiny slowly manifested. But what if the alternative to Palestinian sovereignty is not, as I’ve long supposed, a slow and messy acceptance of a single state for everybody but instead more displacement and death? I used to assume the international community, for all the fecklessness it has shown here, would stop Palestinians from falling too far, being killed in numbers that were too great, losing too much territory. Now I look at Gaza, and I look at the West Bank, and I’m not so sure.
All of that was playing in my mind as I watched the men of Khirbet Zanuta trudge up the hill to try to get home — only to be met by representatives of the various forces arrayed against them: Israeli military power, religious zealots and faceless technology.
On the hilltop, an official with Israel’s Civil Administration awaited them in boots and camouflage. The administration is the powerful bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation and, given the dysfunction of Palestinian officialdom and Israeli oppression, it is the closest simulacrum of governance that many Palestinians experience.
“How did he know we were coming?” the village head, Fayez Til, told me he wondered as he walked over to the official. Mr. Til was plainly dressed and distinctly unarmed, in comparison with his visitor. He speaks Hebrew and studied nursing at Hebron University and treated patients at the village clinic before the settlers started marauding.
The uniformed visitor laid down the law in soft, even tones: If you insist on coming home, he told Mr. Til with an air of generosity, you can — so long as you accept its trashed condition. “It’s as-is,” he said, as if he were selling a house. Army drones had photographed every detail, he explained. If the residents moved so much as a stone or pulled a tarp over an unroofed house, it would be considered an illegal construction, and there could be trouble.
Mr. Til and the others were incredulous: What if it rains?, they pressed. What about the summer sun? The official held firm: You move things, you put up a tarp, you break the law. And then, having delivered this discouraging welcome, he drove off.
Mr. Til and the other men paced and muttered, absorbing the official’s message. By fleeing their homes, they had shown that it was possible to frighten them off the land; now their position appeared even more precarious. Fuad Al-Amor, who oversees a council of 24 villages in the South Hebron Hills, including this one, put it succinctly: “It’s easy to leave. It’s not easy to come back.”
Soon a beat-up Isuzu pickup crunched up the hill. Eyes darted and a ripple of attention slid through the morning air: the settlers. Like many Palestinians, the men of the village know their tormentors quite well. It’s usually the same people: their neighbors.
Three settlers hopped down from the truck — young men who, in an American college town, would pass as worse-for-wear frat boys who’d just woken up after a rough night of drinking. Sunburned and insolent, they swaggered around, smoking cigarettes and demanding information from the villagers.
“You don’t live here anymore. You left. What are you doing here?” one of the young men asked Mr. Til. “Where are you sleeping at night?”
“We didn’t leave,” Mr. Til replied quietly. His posture and tone were deferential. At least one of the settlers carried a pistol stuck in the back of his pants.
Still, the West Bank had lingered all these years in my memory as a fundamentally Palestinian expanse, interrupted and speckled with settlements. Not anymore. Visiting in late November, I had the feeling of entering a vast settlement dotted with Arab communities and refugee camps, shrinking remnants of an earlier place.
I shared this impression with Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former adviser to Palestine Liberation Organization negotiators. She replied by describing an unremarkable thing that sounded amazing to me because I never saw it: You could once drive down main roads in the West Bank, she recalled, straight into Palestinian cities. Settler bypass roads built since the 1990s — a nominal period of peace that nevertheless saw settlements expand at an unprecedented clip — routed traffic away from the places where Palestinians lived, restricted or even banned Palestinian cars and helped to choke off Palestinians’ movement.
Ms. Buttu grew up in Canada on stories of the 1948 destruction of her family’s village near Nazareth. “It wasn’t a one-time event. It was uprooting an entire community,” she said. Ms. Buttu was a ubiquitous presence during the peace talks of the early aughts but has come to regret her role in the negotiations. She no longer believes that Israel was bargaining in good faith and regards the talks as a largely theatrical process that kept everybody busy while Palestinians literally lost ground.
“It gave this very false impression that there was movement happening, and it served as a great distraction,” Ms. Buttu said. “The common diplomatic refrain was, ‘It’s OK, it will go with the negotiations.’ More settlements got built, but, ‘It’s OK, because they’ll go with negotiation.’”
Even U.S. observers sympathetic to Palestinians tend to describe the existing oppression as an unmovable reality. But this, too, is inaccurate, for things have clearly gotten worse.
Under the Oslo Accords, which were the agreements that brushed closest to making peace here, the largest chunk of territory in the West Bank, known as Area C, was to gradually transition to Palestinian jurisdiction, albeit with negotiating room for land swaps.
But that logic has since been turned entirely on its head. Israeli settlers, enthusiastically backed by key parts of the far-right Israeli government, are openly seeking to thin the Arab presence from the same land once envisioned as the raw material of a future Palestinian state. The forced displacement of Khirbet Zanuta is part of that movement, known by some hard-line settlers as “the battle for Area C.”
The legalistic contortions altering the landscape of the West Bank are various: designating land a “firing zone” needed for military training; invoking Ottoman law under which the state may seize uncultivated land. Even archaeological sites — of which there is no shortage in the Holy Land — can be used as a justification for displacing Palestinians.
And then there’s the question of permits.
*As Zelensky Heads to Washington, Russia Targets Kyiv With Missiles*
The Ukrainian leader will be appealing for more military support from the United States as an emboldened Russia steps up its attacks on his country.
As President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine heads to Washington on an urgent mission to rally flagging Western support for his nation, the Russian military on Monday targeted the Ukrainian capital with the most intense salvo of ballistic missiles in months.
Explosions boomed over the snow-covered capital, Kyiv, shortly after 4 a.m.: Missiles racing toward the city at several times the speed of sound had been shot out of the sky even before air alarms could sound and send civilians racing for shelter.
The bombardment came hours after a video circulated on Sunday of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, sipping champagne in Moscow and celebrating waning Western support for Kyiv as he declared that Ukraine had “no future.”
All eight missiles aimed at Kyiv, a city of 3.3 million people, were shot down, and 18 Russian attack drones aimed at targets in southern Ukraine were also defeated, the Ukrainian military said. City officials said that at least four people were injured by falling debris in Kyiv.
The attack came just over two weeks after Russian forces targeted Kyiv with 75 drones — the largest number aimed at the capital since Russia launched its full scale invasion nearly two years ago — and less than four days after the Russian Air Force conducted the first major wave of strikes on Kyiv using its heavy bomber fleet in nearly three months.
“This was probably the start of a more concerted campaign by Russia aimed at degrading Ukraine’s energy infrastructure,” Britain’s defense intelligence agency said on social media just hours before Monday’s pre-dawn assault, referring to the recent attacks.
The ability of Ukrainian air defense crews, using a variety of systems provided by Western partners, to shoot down nearly all incoming missiles and drones over the past week, is a vivid reminder of the vital role Kyiv’s allies play in protecting millions from Russian assaults.
But with a White House request for additional military support for Ukraine stalled in Congress, further American assistance is now in doubt.
The European Union will seek to approve some $50 billion in aid for Ukraine in coming days, but Hungary has threatened to veto that effort, adding to a feeling of uncertainty that is pervasive across Ukraine.
Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, gave voice to that sentiment in an interview with the BBC over the weekend.
“We really need the help,” she said. “In simple words, we cannot get tired of this situation, because if we do, we die.” She added: “It hurts us greatly to see the signs that the passionate willingness to help may fade.”
Mr. Putin, who in the video that circulated Sunday declared that he intends to maintain his grip on power for the foreseeable future, also said he believes Ukraine will only grow weaker as Russia grows stronger.
“When you don’t have your own foundations, you don’t have your own ideology, you don’t have your own industry, you don’t have your own money,” he said at an awards ceremony on Friday at the Kremlin, holding a glass of champagne in his hand. “You don’t have anything that’s your own. Then you don’t have a future, but we have a future.”
Mr. Putin launched his war in February 2022 on the false premise that Ukrainian statehood was a fiction, and he has twisted history in an attempt to justify the destruction of a neighboring state that threatens his imperial ambitions.
The spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, told the Agence France-Presse news agency in a report published over the weekend that the Kremlin had not changed its maximalist goals: the complete political capitulation of Kyiv and the surrender of vast swaths of Ukrainian land to Russia.
The Russian military controls parts of four Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. However, Moscow has illegally annexed the entirety of those regions last year and declared them to be part of Russia.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group, said in its latest analysis that it believed that “Russia’s aims far transcend keeping the territory Russian forces have already seized.”
Fierce fighting continues to rage across the front line as Ukraine increasingly moves into a defensive posture and as Moscow masses troops for another winter offensive.
“The operational situation in the east remains difficult,” Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine’s eastern forces, said on Sunday. “The enemy does not stop conducting offensive operations along the entire front.”
Ukraine’s military said there were nearly 100 clashes with Russian forces over the past 24 hours. Some of the most intense battles were taking place around the embattled city of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
While the situation on the battlefield remains deadlocked — with Russia finding it as difficult to advance through heavily fortified lines this winter as Ukrainian forces did last summer — Ukraine’s diplomatic efforts appear to be intensifying.
Mr. Zelensky’s office said he would travel from Argentina, where he attended the weekend inauguration of the country’s newly elected president, Javier Milei, to Washington for meetings on Tuesday to discuss “joint projects for the production of weapons and air defense systems, as well as coordination of the two countries’ efforts next year.”
His office said he “will focus on ensuring the unity of the United States, Europe and the world around supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russian terror and in strengthening the international order based on rules and respect for the sovereignty of each nation.”
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said that President Biden would meet with Mr. Zelensky as a demonstration of America’s “unshakable commitment” to Ukraine.
“As Russia ramps up its missile and drone strikes against Ukraine, the leaders will discuss Ukraine’s urgent needs and the vital importance of the United States’ continued support at this critical moment,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.
But that commitment has been cast into doubt as Republicans continue to block a $110.5 billion emergency spending bill that includes an additional $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, insisting it be tied to measures related to U.S. border security.
Mr. Zelensky will also meet with Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, the congressman’s spokesman said in a statement.
While Ukrainians are hopeful that the United States will not abandon them, the resistance of a growing and influential faction of Republicans comes at what was already a difficult moment in a war that shows no signs of easing.
Ukrainian air defense teams managed to shoot down the missiles aimed at Kyiv before dawn on Monday. But Ukrainians know this is just the start of a long, hard winter.
*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*
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