INTERVIEW | Victoria Coates on What to Know About Biden’s Meeting With Ukraine’s Zelenskyy

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met Wednesday with President Joe Biden at the White House before delivering an impassioned address to a joint session of Congress. This was the first time Zelenskyy had left Ukraine since Russia launched its military invasion of Ukraine just over 300 days ago.

The timing of the Ukrainian leader's meeting with Biden was no accident, says Victoria Coates, a senior research fellow in international affairs and national security at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage's multimedia news organization.)

"I think the whole point was to force through the $1.7 trillion omnibus; that's the president's kind of last hurrah of gigantic spending, before [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi gives up the gavel," Coates says.

Coates says Zelenskyy's visit was "a Biden show," but the Ukrainian president should "embrace American conservatives" as potentially his most important allies in Washington.

Zelenskyy headed home to Ukraine with a commitment from the Pentagon for a missile defense system known as the Patriot. But, Coates says, Biden should have given Ukraine the defensive support long ago, but instead used the promise of the Patriot system as a tool to bring Zelenskyy to America to push Democrats' massive spending package through Congress.

Coates joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to talk about the role America should play in Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine.

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