Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, has already stated that he favors Kamala Harris for president.

But his wartime rival, Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, has decided to go Putin one better by literally campaigning for Harris in Pennsylvania on the public dime, throwing out statements condemning President Trump to voters.

According to the Daily Caller:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy flew into a key U.S. swing state this week on a taxpayer-funded aircraft after publicly criticizing former President Donald Trump and Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.

Zelenskyy touched down in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Sunday in a U.S. Air Force C-17A aircraft and toured a local munitions factory that has been producing armaments for Ukraine amid the country’s ongoing war against Russia. During his visit, Zelenskyy met with high-level Democratic Pennsylvania officials such as Gov. Josh Shapiro, Sen. Bob Casey and Rep. Matt Cartwright and expressed his gratitude “for their support.”

Which is clearly foreign election interference, as well as likely illegal, given that he had been using a U.S. government aircraft to do it.

Democrats impeached Trump for a phone call with Zelensky. Now, they are autographing ammunition alongside Zelensky on U.S. soil. pic.twitter.com/BfO7bwQTQZ

— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) September 23, 2024

It's also bad optics.

President Trump was nearly murdered a mere week ago by a dirtbag who proclaimed a fanatical devotion to Ukraine's war. Now Zelensky has turned up to try to knock President Trump out another way? He should sit this one out.

This is nothing if not a bad look.

But the irony of it is amazing. Both Zelensky and Putin, locked in a multi-billion-dollar war financed on the Ukraine side by the U.S. are now openly supporting Harris together.

Putin had his reasons for supporting Harris over Trump, which were pretty understandable.

According to Snopes.com:

Speaking at the Eastern Economic Forum in the Russian far-eastern city of Vladivostok on Sept. 5, Putin said he would "lend" Harris his support (archived):

As for my preferences [in the U.S. election], it is not up to us to decide. After all, the American people will have to make their own choice. As I have already said, we favoured Mr Biden, the current President, but they took him out of the race. That said, he advised his supporters to support Ms Harris. So, we will act accordingly and lend her our support.

He later added that the Democratic nominee has "a very contagious" laugh, whereas "no other President has ever imposed so many restrictions and sanctions against Russia" as Trump.

He didn't like Trump's sanctions, so now he supports Harris. Who could argue with him?

It follows from his earlier statement last February that he supported Biden over Trump, once again, giving more rationally recognizable reasons.

According to CNN:

A Joe Biden presidency would be better for Russia than a Donald Trump one, Russian President Vladimir Putin told pro-Kremlin journalist Pavel Zarubin in an on-camera interview Wednesday.

Asked by Zuribin about the upcoming US presidential election, Putin said Biden would be better for Russia “because he is a more experienced person, he is predictable, he is a politician of an old formation.”

However, he added that Russia would “work with any leader of the US that gains the trust of the American people.”

During Trump's presidency, Putin echoed that theme in other ways, saying he hesitated to invade Ukraine because he wasn't sure what Trump would do if he did, so he wisely held off. Events have since shown that he didn't think the same of Biden.

As for Zelensky, his reasons are understandable, too. One, his country has been invaded and vast resources in coal and minerals as well as pipeline real estate are at stake.

More important, the Biden-Harris administration has given him all the money he's wanted, $61 billion on the last run, blowing out the U.S. budget to do it (which creates inflation here), and even getting our factories whirring for him, in contravention to the claims by the Bidenites that he was only getting military surplus.

Actually, he's getting new stuff, and the humming factories, intended to show economic activity in recession-battered Pennsylvania, tell a different story. How that affects U.S. readiness is unknown, but we know there are problems across the board with that.

But for Zelensky, the money flows -- for arms, street sweeping, bureaucratic pensions, for all sorts of stuff, and one of his top people has said that corruption is so widespread that everyone is "stealing like there is no tomorrow." I wrote this last November:

The sad thing here is that the officials taking this money must know that the war effort is lost and Ukraine isn't going to win in the end. The army is dead, the numbers aren't there, and the locals are embracing the E.U. in order to emigrate. Since the officials are all stealing, they're all wagering that Russia is going to win, and with that the reality, they're amassing their own nest eggs in places like Cyprus, Monaco and Switzerland for themselves in order to land with their feet on the ground. Why fight for Ukraine's future when you've already calculated that there is none and your best bet is to just look out for yourself before the Big Guy's cash flow runs out?

That's what seems to be going on here, yet guys like Joe Biden, and Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky keep calling for more, more, more money to flow for the war effort, making increasingly hollow appeals about democracy and the West being at stake when the only thing that is at stake is their own bank accounts.

Besides this Ukrainian hog wallow for the elites over there, consultants in Washington are getting rich off the big-dollar contracts that flow from all this war largesse that Zelensky can never get enough of.

Now he's out campaigning for Harris and more likely than not, it's about the money, honey, and perhaps a bit of blackmail from the White House.

It will backfire on him, as all open foreign interference efforts do on the perpetrators. Voters don't like that. Remember when random Brits wrote letters to random Ohio voters asking them to vote for John Kerry? It backfired.

One hopes that the Pennsylvania public will be onto this awful game and punish Harris for it, too

It's also a bad decision by Zelensky from his own perspective. Because if Trump wins, he isn't likely to forget this little campaign stunt, coming on top of a Ukraine-linked assassination attempt, a phony Ukraine-linked impeachment, and a mountain of fake news about Russia, Russia, Russia. Trump may stop that war all right, since he has a record of opposing, stopping, and preventing wars and keeping peace, but Zelensky won't be getting any victory parades he can brag about after this kind of behavior, because someone else might just be in his place instead.

Image: Twitter video screen shot