Chris Christie Meets With Ukrainian President in Surprise Trip to Kyiv

Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey made an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Friday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky, offering full-throated support for the nation in its war with Russia while staking out a clear position on an issue that has divided his party and his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.

Mr. Christie’s whirlwind one-day trip had the feel at times of an episode from an alternate-universe G.O.P. primary: one in which former President Donald J. Trump had not wrenched the party loose from decades of its foreign-policy history, and in which Mr. Christie’s more traditionally hawkish vision of America’s place in the world might win over voters.

Escorted by a Ukrainian security detail, Mr. Christie visited sites near Kyiv that were devastated during Russia’s drive toward the Ukrainian capital in the first months of the invasion, including Bucha, a Kyiv suburb where Russian soldiers massacred more than 400 people.

“You feel the cruelty, and you feel the inhumanity,” Mr. Christie said later. “You look at this, and I don’t think there’s anyone in our country who would come here and see this and not feel as if these are the things that America needs to stand up to prevent.”

Mr. Christie is the second 2024 G.O.P. hopeful to visit Mr. Zelensky in Kyiv. Former Vice President Mike Pence, one of a handful of other candidates who has unequivocally supported Ukraine in the war, traveled here in June, also visiting the locations of battles and atrocities from last March, during Russia’s thwarted push toward the capital, that are now memorial sites far removed from the front lines.

Speaking to local officials in Moshchun, a village northwest of the capital, Mr. Christie said: “There are hundreds of millions of people in our country who support you.”

Fewer and fewer of those people, though, belong to the Republican Party, which has been steadily turning against U.S. support for Ukraine.

And few in that party seem inclined to vote for Mr. Christie, who was the favored candidate of just 2 percent of likely Republican primary voters in a New York Times/Siena poll this week. The poll showed Mr. Trump with a commanding advantage over all his rivals.

Since April, Kyiv has been protected by formidable U.S.-built Patriot air-defense systems. A smartphone app called Air Alarm Ukraine delivers alerts of incoming missiles and drones as if they were approaching Uber drivers, including one alarm that sounded shortly before Mr. Christie’s meeting with Mr. Zelensky and his administration officials.

As a gift, Mr. Christie presented Mr. Zelensky with framed pages of lyrics to the Bon Jovi song “It’s My Life” — a nod to a video that circulated online early last year, showing residents of Odesa blaring the song over loudspeakers while stacking sandbags in preparation for a Russian invasion.

Mr. Christie said that when he told Jon Bon Jovi, a friend and fellow New Jerseyan, that he would be meeting Mr. Zelensky, the singer insisted on writing the lyrics out by hand as a gift for the Ukrainian president, dispatching the pages by helicopter from his home in the Hamptons in time for Mr. Christie’s departure.

Mr. Zelensky said in a Telegram post on Friday that it was important that Mr. Christie visited Bucha “to see with his own eyes the threat to freedom and to everyone in the world posed by Russian aggression.”

“I thanked all Americans, each and every one, for their vital support,” Mr. Zelensky wrote.

More than any other Republican in the running, Mr. Christie is casting his candidacy as a direct frontal challenge to Mr. Trump — and he has also sought to draw a sharp contrast with the former president in staking out a firm position on Ukraine.

The United States has provided Ukraine with billions of dollars in military and security assistance since Russia’s invasion more than a year ago, with President Biden often framing the extraordinary level of support as part of an existential fight for democracy.

But the war has divided the Republican candidates and Republican voters. A majority of Americans continue to approve of U.S. aid to Ukraine in the conflict, but that support has softened over time, largely owing to increasing Republican opposition. The percentage of Republicans saying the United States is providing “too much” support to Ukraine has grown to 44 percent from 9 percent since the Russian invasion in February 2022, according to polling by the Pew Research Center. A new CNN poll released on Friday suggests that support is falling among independents as well.

Mr. Trump has been a particularly influential skeptic among Republicans.

The 2024 Republican front-runner’s first impeachment resulted from his 2019 phone call to Mr. Zelensky pressuring him to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals after freezing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Ukraine. Mr. Trump, who maintained that he did not pressure Mr. Zelensky, has said that defending Ukraine is not a vital national interest for the United States.

In a CNN town hall in May, he refused to say whether he would continue President Biden’s policy of supplying weapons and ammunition to Ukraine if he returned to the White House, or whether he supported Mr. Zelensky or President Vladimir Putin of Russia in the conflict.

“I want everybody to stop dying,” Mr. Trump said.

In response to those statements, Mr. Christie has called Mr. Trump a “puppet of Putin” and mocked his recent claim that he could negotiate “in one day” a truce between Mr. Zelensky and the Russian leader.

“Move over Churchill, Trump is here to save the day,” Mr. Christie tweeted last month.

“I think he really likes strongmen,” Mr. Christie said of Mr. Trump. “I think those are his role models in terms of the way he would like to control power if left to his own devices.”

Mr. Christie said that in his meeting with Mr. Zelensky, which was closed to reporters, the Ukrainian president “spoke about his desire for there to be bipartisan support for Ukraine.” He said the subject of Mr. Trump did not come up.

Mr. Christie also criticized the Biden administration for not doing more to support the Ukrainian war effort, in particular its delays in supplying Mr. Zelensky’s government with F-16 fighter jets, which Mr. Biden had resisted doing for a year before approving the move in May. “I would have been sending them months ago,” Mr. Christie said. He also favors NATO membership for Ukraine.

Mr. Christie’s promises to take the fight to Mr. Trump may have earned him new admirers — such as a fellow traveler at John F. Kennedy Airport on Wednesday evening, who said she would be cheering for him against Mr. Trump in the first Republican presidential debate later this month — though it is unclear how many of them are likely to actually cast ballots for him.

It is a difficult sell to a primary electorate that for now overwhelmingly prefers Mr. Trump to any other candidate, and a particularly difficult sell for Mr. Christie, who served in Mr. Trump’s administration, advised his 2020 campaign and supported him until Mr. Trump tried to overturn his election loss.

“I wish you political luck,” Anatolii Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, told Mr. Christie during his visit to the city.

“We all hope for that, right?” Mr. Christie replied, clapping him on the back.