US Vice President Kamala Harris has vowed that Washington will “stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies,” should she win the presidential election in November.
During her keynote speech on day four of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on Thursday, the party’s presidential nominee emphasized her intention to “strengthen, not abdicate our global leadership.”
Harris touted her record of helping Biden to rally Western nations to funnel arms and money to Kiev.
Ukraine’s ambition to join NATO is one of the key causes of the ongoing crisis, according to Moscow, which considers the prospect a threat to its own national security.
Harris, who last month replaced Biden as her party’s presidential pick, claimed that her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, had “encouraged” Moscow by supposedly saying that “Russia could ‘do whatever the hell they want’ five days before” the hostilities broke out in February 2022.
The misquote appears to come from Trump’s speech at a campaign rally in South Carolina in February of this year, when he revealed an exchange he’d had while president with the head of a European NATO member.
The official wondered whether the US would defend their country in the event of a Russian attack, even though its government was not meeting the NATO target for defense spending. Trump said he had threatened to abandon “delinquent” members of the US-led bloc in such a scenario.
On Wednesday, Trump claimed during a campaign event in North Carolina that Harris had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin three days before the Ukraine crisis escalated into open conflict.
“Do you think she did a good job? She met with Putin to tell him ‘Don’t do it’, and three days later he attacked,” he stated.
Harris did travel to Europe in February 2022 to meet Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky – a fact that she highlighted in her speech at the DNC. There is no evidence that she and Putin ever met.
The US government claims that Moscow supports Trump against Harris via “influence operations” online. Senior Russian officials have argued that neither candidate would meaningfully change Washington’s antagonistic policy towards Moscow.
Russia “doesn’t interfere in any [US] internal affairs,” Moscow’s ambassador to the country, Anatoly Antonov, stressed on Thursday. The US has so far failed to provide any evidence of meddling in its elections, he noted.