Russia gets the microphone at the U.N. world leaders' meeting Saturday, three years into an invasion of Ukraine that the international community has broadly deplored and a that powerful member newly says Ukraine can repel.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is due to give his country's address at the General Assembly, four days after U.S. President Donald Trump said he believed Ukraine can win back all the territory it has lost to Russia. It was a notable tone shift from a U.S. leader who had previously suggested Ukraine would need to make some concessions and could never reclaim all the areas Russia has occupied since seizing the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and launching a full-scale invasion in 2022.
Just three weeks earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country and the U.S. had a “mutual understanding” and that Trump's administration "is listening to us.”
Trump's new view came after he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of General Assembly Tuesday — seven months after a televised blow-up between the two in the Oval Office. This time, the doors were closed, and the tenor was evidently different — "a good meeting,” as Zelenskyy described it in his assembly speech the next day.
For the fourth year in a row, Zelenskyy appealed to the gathering of presidents, prime ministers and other top officials to get Russia out of his country — and warned that inaction would put other countries at risk.
“Ukraine is only the first," he said.
Unauthorized flights into NATO’s airspace — intrusions blamed on Russia — have raised alarm around Europe in recent weeks, particularly after NATO jets downed drones over Poland and Estonia said Russian fighter jets flew into its territory and lingered for 12 minutes. Russia denied that its planes entered Estonian airspace and said the drones didn't target Poland, with Moscow's ally Belarus maintaining that Ukrainian signal-jamming sent the devices off-course.
But European leaders see the incidents as intentional, provocative moves meant to rattle NATO and to suss how the alliance will respond.
Russia has offered various explanations for the Ukraine war, among them assuring its own security after NATO expanded eastward over the years.
Lavrov's address to the General Assembly last year was a bitter swipe at the West, whetted with a reference to “the senselessness and the danger of the very idea of trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power, which is what Russia is.”
