Washington, D.C. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wants Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to fire his country’s representative to the U.S. This comes as Republicans call Zelensky’s trip to an ammunition plant in Pennsylvania, a swing state, a political stunt.
Zelensky spoke to the UN in New York on the eve of his trip to Washington, D.C., where he plans to tell lawmakers on Capitol Hill about the war effort before meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House. This is when the Republican speaker made his demand.
“The tour was clearly a partisan campaign event meant to help Democrats, and it is clearly meddling in the election,” Johnson wrote to Zelensky in a letter.
Johnson, who is close to Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president, said that no Republicans were asked to the tour of the plant on Sunday. He said that Ambassador Oksana Markarova set up the tour.
As a matter of course, the Army said they would call members of the House and Senate who represent the districts where these kinds of factories are located. An official, who did not want to be named because the conversation was private, said that interested congressional members from the area were present.
Other Democrats who went on the trip were Gov. Josh Shapiro, Sen. Bob Casey, and Rep. Matt Cartwright from the area. The plant is in Scranton, which is where Biden grew up.
Markarova is a well-liked diplomat in Washington, D.C., and has been a fixture on Capitol Hill since the start of the war, even sitting in the visitor’s gallery during important speeches. The speaker’s harsh demand that Markarova be fired quickly comes at a tough time for Ukraine, as Zelensky tries to secure U.S. support for the war effort in an election year.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Biden and most Democrats in Congress have mostly stood with them. The U.S. has sent billions of dollars in aid to buy weapons and provide support services. But Republicans have become very divided. Trump has steered the GOP toward a new movement called “America First,” which wants to keep the U.S. out of other countries’ affairs as much as possible, and he often says nice things about Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin.
Johnson said that support for stopping Russia’s war against Ukraine “continues to be bipartisan, but our relationship is unnecessarily tested.” He pointed out that the Ukrainian government had said some negative things about the top of the Trump-Vance ticket for president.
In his own speech on Wednesday, Trump criticized Zelensky and said that the people of Ukraine are “dead” and the country itself is “demolished.” This made people wonder how much U.S. help the former president would give Ukraine to fight Russia if he were elected president again.
Later, Johnson said that the ambassador “crossed the line” and that the problem needs “immediate attention and action.” He also said that he won’t be meeting with Zelensky at the Capitol on Thursday.
Zelensky went to the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant to thank the people who make one of the most important weapons for his country’s fight against Russian ground troops.
One of the few plants in the country that can make 155 mm gun shells is in Scranton. Over the past year, production has gone up. The US has already sent more than 3 million of them to Ukraine.
Zelensky wrote on X, “It is in places like this that you can really feel that the democratic world can win.”
“Thanks to these kind of people in Ukraine, the U.S., and all of our partner countries who work nonstop to protect life.”
Zelensky is not the first foreign leader to visit U.S. factories that make and sell guns to their own country without drawing protests from Republicans. NATO allies in Europe have been making more and more of these kinds of trips to show how U.S. relationships bring jobs and money back to the U.S.
Zelensky has also met with only Republicans on some trips to the U.S. in the past. In July, he went to Utah to talk at the National Governors Association. The outgoing chairman of the group, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, made him feel welcome. During the trip, Zelensky also met with all of Utah’s Republicans in Congress.
The Republicans quickly retaliated against the Scranton visit.
Rep. James Comer, the Republican head of the House Oversight Committee, said Wednesday that he was starting an investigation into whether the Biden-Harris administration used taxpayer money to pay for Zelensky’s flight to Pennsylvania for a campaign event for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
He wrote letters to Biden, the White House counsel, and other people in the administration asking them to look into whether the Biden-Harris Administration tried to use a foreign leader to help Vice President Harris’s campaign for president and, if they did, whether they did something wrong by abusing their power.
The Pentagon said that the flight was paid for by the Defense Department and was for senior officials from the Defense and State departments who were “on official business related to U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.”“ The Pentagon said the plane made a stop at Newark Liberty International Airport and “met President Zelensky.” It then flew on to Wilkes-Barre International Airport in Pennsylvania.
On Wednesday, all Senate Republicans, even those who had backed giving money to Ukraine, were very critical of Zelensky. A Republican from Oklahoma named Sen. Markwayne Mullin said, “He really messed up.”
But Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a strong supporter of Ukraine, said Zelensky’s visit might not have been as biased as it seemed. Wicker was going to meet the president of Ukraine at the Capitol on Thursday.
“If President Zelensky came to Mississippi, he would be accompanied by Republicans,” he said. “That’s who the people correctly chose.”
