US defense chief promises Ukraine what it needs to fight Russia but goes no further

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The United States “will get Ukraine what it needs” to fight its war with Russia, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on an unannounced visit to Kyiv on Monday, but he gave no hint that Washington might endorse key planks of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's so-called “victory plan.”

The United States will provide Ukraine with what it requires "to fight for its survival and security,” Austin said in a speech at the Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine. He noted that the U.S. has delivered more than $58 billion in security assistance for Ukraine since Russia's February 2022 full-scale invasion, making it Kyiv's main backer.

But Zelenskyy has asked Ukraine's Western allies to go a few steps further, notably inviting Ukraine to join NATO and letting it use Western-supplied longer-range missiles to strike military targets deep inside Russian territory. Those steps have met with a lukewarm response.

Ukraine is having difficulty holding back a ferocious Russian campaign along the eastern front that is gradually compelling Kyiv’s forces to give up a series of towns, villages and hamlets. It faces a hard winter after Russia targeted its power grid.

Austin's remarks were notable for what they did not include — an endorsement of Ukraine being invited into NATO, or any indication the U.S. will support Ukraine becoming more aggressive in its defense with longer-range attacks on Russian soil.

With the U.S. presidential election about two weeks away, U.S. officials are treading carefully. President Joe Biden has balked at measures that might escalate the war and bring a confrontation between NATO and Russia.

Austin said "there is no silver bullet. No single capability will turn the tide. No one system will end Putin’s assault.”

He added: “Make no mistake. The United States does not seek war with Russia.”

“What matters is the way that Ukraine fights back," Austin told the assembled diplomatic and military personnel at the academy. "What matters is the combined effects of your military capabilities. And what matters is staying focused on what works.”

Zelenskyy said in a Sunday evening video address that his ‘victory plan’ had won the backing of France, Lithuania, Nordic countries and “many other allies” in the European Union, which he didn’t name.

Zelenskyy said he had received “very positive signals from the United States,” but he stopped short of saying he had secured Washington’s blessing for the plan.

Analysts say the U.S. is unlikely to make a decision before the Nov. 5. presidential election.

The latest Russian strikes on Ukraine, targeting Kyiv, Odesa and Zaporizhzhia, rammed home the urgency for Kyiv officials of clinching guarantees of more support, particularly large amounts of ammunition for the war of attrition the sides are engaged in.

A Russian missile attack on the southern city of Zaporizhzhia killed two people and injured 15 in the city center and caused huge damage to civilian infrastructure, including a kindergarten and more than 30 residential buildings, regional Gov. Ivan Fedorov said.

Russia conducted a ballistic missile strike at Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyy’s hometown, injuring five people, city administration head Oleksandr Vilkul wrote on social media.

According to Vilkul, Russia has conducted ballistic missile attacks on Kryvyi Rih for three consecutive days, injuring the total of 21 people and damaging dozens of residential buildings and civilian infrastructure.

Machine gunfire and the noise of drones’ engines was also heard in Kyiv’s center throughout the night. Authorities reported minor damages to civilian infrastructure caused by falling drone debris in three districts.

Russia fired three missiles and more than 100 drones at Ukraine overnight from Sunday to Monday, Ukraine's air force said.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha met with his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan in Ankara on Monday to discuss cooperation between their countries.

According to Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry, the meeting focused on strengthening strategic relations, defense cooperation and addressing global food security through Black Sea grain shipments from Ukraine that pass through Turkey’′ Bosphorus Strait.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to steer a balanced line in his NATO-member country’s close relations with both Ukraine and Russia. He has previously offered to host a peace summit between the two countries.

Associated Press writer Tara Copp in Washington contributed.

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

In this photo provided by the Press Service Of The President Of Ukraine on October 21, 2024, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, centre right, and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, centre left, attend their meeing in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Press Service Of The President Of Ukraine via AP)

In this photo provided by the Press Service Of The President Of Ukraine on Oct. 21, 2024, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, right, and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shake hands during their meeting in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Press Service Of The President Of Ukraine via AP)

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service on Oct. 21, 2024, a rescue worker extinguishes a fire at a house destroyed by a Russian strike in Kharkiv, Ukraine. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service on Oct. 21, 2024, rescue workers clear the rubble of a house destroyed by a Russian strike in Kharkiv, Ukraine. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service, emergency workers clear the rubble after Russia attacked the city with guided bombs overnight in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service, emergency workers clear the rubble after an overnight Russian attack with guided bombs in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service, emergency workers clear the rubble after Russia attacked the city with guided bombs overnight in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)

In this photo released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, a Russian self-propelled mortar Nona-SVK fires towards Ukrainian positions at an undisclosed location in Ukraine. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)

With just over two weeks to go before the 2024 presidential election and the race in a dead heat, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are hitting the campaign trail in strategic battleground states.

Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.

Here’s the latest:

The first question for Harris during a moderated conversation with Republican Liz Cheney was about how she’d help make it easier for people in the “sandwich” generation, who are caring for their parents and also their small kids.

The voter, Alexandra Miller, has a 7-year-old and a 72-year-old mother who she also cares for, and she teared up explaining it to the Democratic nominee. She says it’s impossibly hard and expensive.

Harris says “this issue for me is a matter of dignity.” She says she will restructure so Medicare covers the cost in-home healthcare for older people, so there would be assistance.

She’s campaigning with Republican Liz Cheney and talking to a group of voters in suburban Pennsylvania. She says Donald Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric has dominated American discourse for too long.

She says it’s been used “in a way that has been using the power of the presidency to demean and divide us.”

She says Americans are exhausted by Trump’s rhetoric and ready for a return to caring about neighbors.

Republican U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards noted he also owns McDonald’s franchises and that Trump had learned to make French fries a day earlier.

He presented Trump with what he called a “French fry certification pin.” Trump held up the pin affixed to a piece of paper.

Mike Stewart, owner of Pine View Buildings, thanked the Republican nominee for visiting the region and offered to pray for him.

Putting a hand on Trump’s shoulder, Stewart prayed to God, “I ask that you anoint Donald Trump.”

Cheney is campaigning with Harris in battleground states Monday. She says the most conservative value of all is to be “faithful to the Constitution.” And she believes Harris will be, and more importantly, Republican Donald Trump will not be.

Cheney says Trump’s actions after the violent Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol show he doesn’t take the U.S. Constitution seriously.

The women were talking in a conversation moderated by a GOP strategist. They began their day in Pennsylvania. The women spoke to a crowd of voters, sitting in front of signs that read: “Country over Party.”

He visited a part of Asheville heavily damaged by the hurricane. There were huge piles of debris near where he stopped, with abandoned cars and many buildings smashed or knocked off their foundations.

Trump again criticized the federal government for what he said was not a good enough job helping people recover. He said that if elected president, he would stand with the region until “the communities are fully rebuilt.”

Walz said on “The View” that his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris “actually worked at McDonalds. She didn’t go and pander, and disrespect McDonald’s workers, by standing there in your red tie: Take a picture.”

Trump visited a Pennsylvania McDonalds on Sunday, gleefully working the fry station and answering questions from reporters in the drive thru.

Walz was also asked on “The View” to name one nice thing about Trump, but demurred. He offered only that one positive is, “He will not be president again.”

But he said that wasn’t the same as Republican former President Donald Trump’s constant, deliberate misstatements.

“I do think it’s important that we’re careful about how we speak,” Walz said of making previously misleading statements, that he later had to correct. Those included talking about his service in the National Guard and past travel to China.

“But I think the public sees,” Walz added, “Just the massive amount of misinformation that gets out there,” driven by Trump.

Walz was asked about how the Democratic ticket would bring change after Election Day.

He pointed to Harris proposing expanding Medicare funding so that it covers home-care costs for the “sandwich generation,” or Americans caring for aging parents and children at the same time.

“I think she’s really leaning into these issues that impact people first,” Walz said, “Those are pretty big differences.”

Walz, also the governor of Minnesota, is on the same set weeks after Harris herself made a View appearance. She was asked then about what she’d do different in the White House than what’s been done by President Joe Biden, but failed to name major changes.

Walz said of one of his unofficial campaign slogans, “Mind your own damn business,” is a good way to live, making Americans better neighbors.

Western North Carolina will recover, Gov. Cooper said at a storm recovery effort briefing Monday in Asheville, but they “don’t need the election process to hurt recovery efforts.”

Cooper said a bipartisan bill that he signed increases opportunities to vote, giving county boards and voters more flexibility, but disinformation and misinformation that hurts the people they’re trying to help “needs to stop.”

Many storm survivors lost everything and they want help and truth, he said.

“We should work together to give them both,” Cooper said. “Storm recovery cannot be partisan. To truly help people, we must check party politics at the door and get this job done.”

One of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer’s daughters calls Donald Trump’s references to her father’s genitalia “a poor choice of approaches” to honoring his memory, adding that she wasn’t upset by the remarks.

“There’s nothing much to say. I’m not really upset,” Peg Palmer Wears, 68, told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday. “I think it was a poor choice of approaches to remembering my father, but what are you going to do?”

On Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania — the city where Palmer was born in 1929 and learned to golf from his father — Trump kicked off his rally in the campaign’s closing weeks with a detailed, 12-minute story about Palmer that included an anecdote about what Palmer looked like in the showers.

“When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”

▶ Read more about Trump’s comments on Arnold Palmer.

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal Monday from former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who was trying to hold Trump liable for his jailing that he said was retaliation for writing a tell-all memoir.

The justices did not explain their reasoning in the brief, routine order.

Cohen had asked the high court to revive a lawsuit filed after his early release from prison during the coronavirus pandemic was quickly reversed. Authorities said he wouldn’t accept some conditions of his release, but Cohen said he’d only asked if he could speak to the media about his memoir. He sued Trump, then-Attorney General William Barr and prison officials.

Cohen served time after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance charges in 2018. He said Trump directed him to arrange the payment of hush money to a porn actor to fend off damage to his 2016 presidential bid. Trump has denied wrongdoing.

She made the comments during an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America” about revamped White House tours. The interview aired Monday morning.

Asked by Deborah Roberts if it would be tough to leave the White House, Biden said “we’re starting a new chapter of our lives, a new journey.”

Roberts asked if her husband made the correct decision to stop his bid for another four years.

“It was the right call, yes,” the first lady said.

Kamala Harris’ campaign and affiliated Democratic groups raised about $633 million for the quarter, which ended last month, pushing their total to over $1 billion and maintaining a large financial advantage over Republican candidate Donald Trump in the election’s final sprint.

The vice president’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state parties raised more than $359 million in September alone.

But Harris’ campaign is spending heavily too. It raised about $222 million on its own in September, only to pay out about $270 million over the same period — helping to boost a large advertising push.

The Harris campaign and affiliated committees entered October with $346 million on hand, according to federal filings.

Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and affiliated groups previously reported raising $160 million in September. By October, they had $283 million in the bank.

Reproductive rights measures are on the ballots in 10 states after heated debates over how to describe their impact on abortion — and that’s just in English.

In 388 places across the U.S. where English isn’t the primary language among communities of voters, the federal Voting Rights Act requires that all elections information be made available in each community’s native language.

Such translations are meant to help non-native English speakers understand what they’re voting for. But vague or technical terms can be challenging, even more so when it comes to Indigenous languages that have only limited written dictionaries.

For example, there’s no single word for abortion in the native language of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe in Colorado’s Montezuma County. New York’s referendum doesn’t even use the word “abortion,” making it all the more challenging to convey intent, advocates complain. And how exactly should the science of “viability” in the Florida and Nevada measures be explained in the oral traditions of the Seminole and Shoshone tribes?

The Navajo and Hopi tribes get more material translated than most, and they have more than enough voters to sway outcomes.

▶ Read more about translating ballot measures into other languages.

Voters remain largely divided over whether they prefer Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Kamala Harris to handle key economic issues, although Harris earns slightly better marks on elements such as taxes for the middle class, according to a new poll.

A majority of registered voters in the survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research describe the economy as poor. About 7 in 10 say the nation is going in the wrong direction.

But the findings reaffirm that Trump has lost what had been an advantage on the economy, which many voters say is the most important issue this election season above abortion, immigration, crime and foreign affairs.

“Do I trust Trump on the economy? No. I trust that he’ll give tax cuts to his buddies like Elon Musk,” said poll respondent Janice Tosto, a 59-year-old Philadelphia woman and self-described independent.

An AP-NORC poll conducted in September found neither Harris nor Trump had a clear advantage on handling “the economy and jobs.” But this poll asked more specific questions about whether voters trusted Trump or Harris to do a better job handling the cost of housing, jobs and unemployment, taxes on the middle class, the cost of groceries and gas, and tariffs.

▶ Read more about the poll.

Donald Trump went to a barbershop in the Bronx section of New York for a segment with commentator Lawrence Jones that aired Monday on “Fox & Friends.”

He took questions from clients at the business about immigration, energy and taxes. The barbers wore a black shirt with the phrase “Make Barbers Great Again.”

One of the clients asked Trump if, once he generated enough revenue with some of his proposals, it would be possible to eliminate federal taxes.

“There is a way. There is a way,” Trump said, adding that in the 1890s, people did not have to pay income taxes.

The business owner, who leases the building, told him his main challenge was paying for his energy bill, which had shot up from $2,100 to $15,000 in the last seven months.

“What?” Trump said. “How many heads can you take care of? That’s a lot.”

Trump asked how much average hair cuts cost and how much they had gone up. He was told they had gone up from a range between $12 and $15 to between $30 and $40.

Toward the end of the visit, Trump told the men “you guys are the same as me. It’s the same stuff. We were born the same way.”

For Rona Kaufman, the signs are everywhere that more Jews feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and may vote for Republican Donald Trump.

It’s in her Facebook feed. It’s in the discomfort she observed during a question-and-answer at a recent Democratic Party campaign event in Pittsburgh. It’s in her own family.

“The family that is my generation and older generations, I don’t think anybody is voting for Harris, and we’ve never voted Republican, ever,” Kaufman, 49, said, referring to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. “My sister has a Trump sign outside her house, and that is a huge shift.”

How big a shift? Surveys continue to find that most Jewish voters still support the Democratic ticket, and Kaufman acknowledges that she’s an exception.

Still, any shift could have enormous implications in Pennsylvania, where tens of thousands of votes decided the past two presidential elections. Many Jewish voters say the 2024 presidential election is like no other in memory, coming amid the growing fallout from Hamas’ brutal attack on Israelis last year.

▶ Read more about Jewish voters in this election.

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump talks during a interview as he attends the New York Jets football game against the Pittsburgh Steelers at Acrisure Stadium, Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris listens as Stevie Wonder performs "Redemption Song" during a church service and early vote event at Divine Faith Ministries International, Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024, in Jonesboro, Ga. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)