U.N. Live Updates: Zelensky to Make Case for Keeping a Focus on Ukraine

Mr. Zelensky’s address is expected later Wednesday morning. The New York Times will livestream his remarks.

Also scheduled to address the General Assembly on the second day of its annual meeting is President Emmanuel Macron of France, who has been navigating political turmoil at home with an election and new cabinet. His remarks are expected to highlight France’s position as a key player in global diplomacy. Mr. Macron has often played the role of lead liaison at the Assembly between the West and adversaries such as Iran.

Several African leaders will speak to the gathering on Wednesday, including speakers from Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Zimbabwe and Chad. They are expected to echo growing calls for permanent African representation on the Security Council, including from the United States, which has said it would support two permanent seats for African countries.

Here’s what else to know:

• Security Council meetings: The Security Council is scheduled to convene a meeting on Wednesday attended by foreign ministers and some heads of states about the challenges that the council has faced in ending conflicts. The Council will also hold an emergency session on Lebanon on Wednesday evening. France’s foreign minister requested the meeting after Israeli strikes killed more than 500 people on Monday.

• Climate change: The U.N. will host an all-day climate conference Wednesday focused on threats posed by rising sea levels, one of the pressing issues for low-lying and small island developing countries. “We are in a climate meltdown,” the U.N.’s secretary general, António Guterres, said in his address to the Assembly on Tuesday.

• Crisis in Sudan: The Assembly will also host a side event on Wednesday calling for “urgent and collective support to scale up the humanitarian response in Sudan,” according to the U.N.’s website. A ruthless civil war in the country has “unleashed one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday.

• Biden’s last address: President Biden spoke on Tuesday in his fourth and final address to the Assembly as U.S. leader, reflecting on the conflicts he has seen during his career in public service, and warned that the world once again faced an “inflection point.” “Our task, our test, is to make sure that the forces holding us together are stronger than those that are pulling us apart,” he said.

• Iran’s new leader: The newly elected president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, spoke Tuesday afternoon, telling world leaders that he campaigned on reform and engagement with the world and that he aimed to usher Iran into “a new era.” Mr. Pezeshkian also criticized Israel for what he called “crimes against humanity” and presented Iran’s support of a network of proxy militia groups as support for freedom fighters.

• The threat of a multifront war. Many other speakers on Tuesday also castigated Israel over its war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, where the death toll in nearly a year of fighting has surpassed 41,000 people, according to local health authorities. Escalating cross-border volleys of missiles fired by Israel and by Hezbollah in Lebanon have raised the threat of a multifront war in the Middle East.

Enter the “victory plan,” which Mr. Zelensky has described in news media interviews as a bridge to a future peace settlement — a strategy aimed at strengthening Ukraine’s position on the battlefield enough to force Russia to the negotiating table.

Mr. Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials have been tight-lipped about the specifics of the plan until it is formally presented to Mr. Biden later this week, but its general outline has begun to emerge. In statements before traveling to the United States, Mr. Zelensky said the plan includes enhancing Western security guarantees for Ukraine, increasing military aid and securing further financial support.

Military experts say one of the key demands is for Western allies that have supplied powerful missiles to allow Ukraine to fire them into Russia, an authorization that has yet to be granted despite intense lobbying.

Andriy Yermark, the head of the Ukrainian presidential office, said on Tuesday that the plan also included a formal invitation from NATO for Ukraine to join the military alliance.

Neither of those two demands is new, and it is unclear how the plan differs from what Ukraine has long been calling for. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said last week that she had seen the plan and that it “can work.”

It remains unclear to what extent Mr. Biden would endorse any plan that would involve increased U.S. financial aid for Ukraine. A recent Pew Research Center poll revealed a divided American public: about a third believe the United States gives too much support to Ukraine, while a quarter think the current level is sufficient, and another quarter feel the U.S. is not doing enough.

In an interview with The New Yorker published on Sunday, Mr. Zelensky said Mr. Biden refusing to endorse the plan is “a horrible thought.”

“It would mean that Biden doesn’t want to end the war in any way that denies Russia a victory,” he said in the interview. “We would end up with a very long war — an impossible, exhausting situation that would kill a tremendous number of people.”

Speaking with The New York Times last week — in his first interview with a Western media outlet — he made the case for a different world order that gives more weight to Africa.

Before traveling to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, Mr. Faye called for “a reform of the world system and an equality among its peoples.”

Demographic importance should help determine who holds power at the United Nations, Mr. Faye said, pointing out that by 2050, Africa’s population will likely be nearly 2.5 billion — accounting for an estimated one of every four people on the planet by then.

His remarks came amid growing calls for permanent African representation on the United Nations Security Council. This month, the United States said it would support two permanent seats for African countries. But this is unlikely to happen soon, analysts say, as many other countries are demanding seats and any change requires the assent of all five permanent members with veto power.

Mr. Faye said that the current world order is hurting Africans.

For instance, he said, Africa is hardly responsible for climate change, and yet when emissions from the developed world cause the polar ice caps to melt, “this has repercussions on our shores.” He pointed to Bargny, a town in Senegal plagued by coastal erosion caused by rising sea levels where dozens of homes were recently swept away.

And he railed against the injustice of rich nations continuing to use coal while refusing to finance fossil fuel projects in developing countries. Production recently began at Senegal’s first offshore oil project, and the country is trying to build the infrastructure to convert its gas into electricity.

Mr. Faye gave the interview amid the pomp of Dakar’s presidential palace, all red carpets and gold lions. But he has gotten rid of some of the furniture in the office used by his predecessor, Macky Sall, making it a little more austere.

Mr. Faye spent most of the election’s run-up awaiting trial in jail, charged with defamation and contempt of court. He was chosen for the presidential ticket by Ousmane Sonko, Senegal’s most formidable opposition politician, who was also jailed and barred from running. When Mr. Sall released the two men 10 days before the election, thousands celebrated.

Mr. Faye won more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round of the March election, beating the chosen candidate of Mr. Sall and eliminating any need for a runoff.

At 44, Mr. Faye said he feels uniquely placed to understand the challenges young Africans face. He said their main desire is “to be useful — useful to themselves, their families, their country.”

“We have to give answers to our young people, so they are not thrown into permanent despair,” said the soft-spoken Mr. Faye. More despair, he added, would help both traffickers of migrants and jihadist groups with recruitment.

Just outside the palace lay the glimmering Atlantic Ocean, where thousands of Senegalese people of Mr. Faye’s generation have died trying to make it to Europe in boats.

Ramping up job training for youth is one of his top priorities, he said.

“What’s important is that young people have qualifications,” he said, “so that when they see a job they can apply — or if they choose to migrate legally, they can be employable in the country they have chosen to go to.”

Mr. Faye and his prime minister, Mr. Sonko, captivated young Senegalese by denouncing political elites, promising to negotiate better deals with oil and gas companies, and pledging to reform the regional currency, the CFA, which is backed by France.

But six months into their term, young people are still fleeing the country in search of a better life. In the first half of 2024, nearly 20,000 migrants reached the Canary Islands, part of Spain, after crossing by boat from the coast of West Africa, according to the U.N.’s migration agency, an increase of 167 percent from 2023. Dozens of shipwrecks have been recorded.

“People expect them to take measures to tackle the high cost of living and youth unemployment,” said Ndongo Samba Sylla, a Senegalese economist, but he said that the country’s leaders were held back by high levels of debt servicing inherited from previous administrations. “There is very little they could do in these areas.”

Unable to get some of his proposals through an opposition-dominated Parliament, Mr. Faye recently called a snap parliamentary election for November. He acknowledged that the people who elected him in “immense hope” will judge him on one main thing: his ability to transform their prospects.

“In a country like Senegal, everything is a priority and everything is urgent,” he said.

Mr. Pezeshkian’s speech was unusually reconciliatory in tone and words. In the past, Iranian presidents have used the global platform of the Assembly to project defiance, and have threatened to take revenge on American presidents and denied the Holocaust in their speeches.

Instead, Mr. Pezeshkian extended an olive branch to Iran’s Western adversaries, with the exception of Israel. To what extent his rhetoric will match Iran’s actions remains to be seen.

The Iranian president praised Iran’s nuclear deal with the West as a diplomatic achievement and said Tehran was ready to engage in negotiations with all sides to return to the deal and lift U.S. sanctions.

He said once that hurdle is overcome, “fully and in good faith, dialogue on other issues can follow.”

Still, analysts said that Mr. Pezeshkian’s peace message did not match the country’s actions on the ground, where the powerful Revolutionary Guards Corps supports and arms militant groups like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq and Syria. These groups have been launching attacks on Israel, U.S. military bases and, in the case of the Houthis, ships on the Red Sea.

On Oct. 7, Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza, killing roughly 1,200 people, including women and children, according to Israeli authorities, and taking more than 200 hostages.

Iran has denied that it supports Russia in its war against Ukraine. But Western officials say that the country has been supplying Russia with drones, which the Kremlin has used against targets in Ukraine for more than a year, and that Iran recently delivered short-range ballistic missiles to Russia.

When it came to Israel, Mr. Pezeshkian took a harsher stand but stopped short of directly threatening the country.

Like many world leaders who spoke at the Assembly today, Mr. Pezeshkian slammed Israel for what he called “atrocities in Gaza,” the wave of recent attacks in Lebanon that have killed hundreds of people and a covert war with Iran assassinating its nuclear scientists, diplomats and “guests on our soil” — a reference to the killing of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.

Mr. Pezeshkian defended Iran’s support of the militant networks known as the “axis of resistance” in the Middle East which have taken up arms against Israel, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. He called the networks “popular liberation movements of people that have been victims of four generations of the crimes and colonialism of the Israeli regime.”

Mr. Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon, is a reformist who won the election in July against a conservative candidate. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on all state matters, has endorsed Mr. Pezeshkian and called on all government branches and political factions to cooperate with him.

“He has a really difficult balancing act to put on display in New York, because a lot of the priorities he is pursuing are mutually exclusive,” Ali Vaez, the Iran director for the International Crisis Group, said of Mr. Pezeshkian. “He wants to improve relations with the West when Iran is on the opposite side of the West in the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.”

Mr. Pezeshkian called on the international community to immediately bring a cease-fire in Gaza and “bring an end to the desperate barbarism of Israel in Lebanon, before it engulfs the region and the world,” saying that aggression with thousands of victims “cannot go unanswered.”

In April, after Israel struck Iran’s Embassy in Damascus, Syria, Iran retaliated by launching hundreds of drones and missiles against Israel. And Tehran vowed revenge after Israel assassinated Hamas’s political leader, Mr. Haniyeh, but after intense diplomatic efforts military commanders said Iran would retaliate at a time and place of its choosing.

Mr. Pezeshkian said he had a message for the American people: “We have the opportunity to transcend these limitations and enter a new era. This era will commence with the acknowledgment of Iran’s security concerns and cooperation on mutual challenges.”

At this year’s General Assembly, Mr. Netanyahu’s moment on the world stage will be clouded by the conflict and the backdrop of global condemnation for his prosecution of the war in Gaza. More than 41,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to local health authorities, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. And more than 600 Palestinians have been killed over the same period in the occupied West Bank, mostly in military actions and a few at the hands of extremist Jewish settlers, according to the United Nations.

Israel is battling a genocide case at the U.N.’s top court over the Gaza war while the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has requested arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, along with several Hamas leaders, on accusations of crimes against humanity.

And in just days of intense Israeli assaults on southern and eastern Lebanon, hundreds of people have been reported dead and thousands wounded. With that escalation still underway, Mr. Netanyahu has delayed his arrival in New York by days, and his speech appears to have been brought forward from Friday to Thursday, to shorten his time abroad.

For Mr. Netanyahu, the assembly presents an opportunity to make Israel’s case. As Israel’s longest serving prime minister — his first term in office was in the 1990s, though he has been in and out of power since — he ranks as one of the assembly’s most veteran leaders.

“He’s the figure most identified with Israel for the last generation,” said Mazal Mualem, an Israeli political commentator for Al-Monitor, a Middle East news site, and the author of a biography of the Israeli leader, “Cracking the Netanyahu Code.”

Mr. Netanyahu views such occasions as being of historic importance, Ms. Mualem added, though at times in the past, many in the U.N. chamber have left the General Assembly hall when he takes the microphone, leaving him to speak to a largely empty hall.

That might matter less to Mr. Netanyahu, who is known to tailor his speeches abroad toward impressing his audience back home, burnishing his domestic credentials as a world player leagues above his competitors.

“His target audience will clearly be his home audience,” Ms. Mualem said.

His domestic audience is hardly united over his leadership. Many Israelis had demanded his resignation in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led assault, which caught Israel off-guard and exposed years of deep intelligence, military and policy failures, mostly on Mr. Netanyahu’s watch. Yet he has so far staved off internal and external pressures, and has chalked up a personal victory for now, at least, by surviving politically, against the odds.

“He’s come after the worst year in Israel’s history and his own history, and he just doesn’t give up,” said Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster and analyst who worked as an aide to Mr. Netanyahu in the 1990s.

“Bibi is the Israeli entrepreneur who doesn’t let failure stand in his way,” he said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his popular nickname. “He keeps moving forward.”

“Our world in a whirlwind,” he told the gathering of world leaders. “We are edging towards the unimaginable.”

Mr. Guterres has had a turbulent year himself. His staff have been killed in record numbers in Gaza and he has seen his role and relevance challenged. But on Tuesday, the “whirlwind” he spoke of referred to wars, impunity and the outdated international system.

Mr. Guterres called for an immediate cease-fire in all of the wars and for the immediate release of the hostages being held in Gaza. He also warned that the world must do everything in its power to prevent Lebanon — which has come under fierce bombardment from Israel’s military in recent days — from turning into another Gaza.

He delivered a grim overview of global crises in which state and nonstate actors have violated the U.N. charter, international conventions, court orders and international law — and faced little to no consequences.

“We see this age of impunity everywhere — in the Middle East, in the heart of Europe, in the Horn of Africa, and beyond,” Mr. Guterres said. He drew comparisons between the Cold War and current conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar — saying that they all lacked guardrails and red lines.

Calling the current state of the world “unsustainable,” Mr. Guterres said that “we can’t go on like this.” But he also expressed hope — telling world leaders that “the challenges we face are solvable.”

The only path forward, Mr. Guterres said, requires action: Overhauling international institutions such as the Security Council and the World Bank to better reflect the realities and needs of today’s world, and for countries to come together and cooperate around a common purpose.

“It is in all our interests to manage the epic transformations underway, to choose the future we want and guide our world toward it,” he said.

“My fellow leaders,” Mr. Biden said, “let us never forget: Some things are more important than staying in power.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Biden focused heavily on America’s and the West’s response to the Ukraine invasion, declaring that the United States and its allies, chiefly NATO, had “ensured the survival of Ukraine as a free nation.”

But he stopped short of assessing how he did in what he has described as the central challenge of his time: ensuring that democracy wins out over autocracy. And he acknowledged that Ukraine’s power to hold off Russia could be fleeting — a point that set the stage for Mr. Biden’s meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at the White House on Thursday.

“We cannot grow weary, we cannot look away,” the president declared, in what may be his last opportunity to rally global support behind a conflict that has played a central role in his presidency.

Mr. Biden came to office promising to restore American leadership in the world. “America is back,” he liked to say. He used Tuesday’s U.N. speech to spotlight his administration’s efforts at global engagement, from investments in clean energy and clean water in developing nations to a new commitment, announced during his speech, to spend $500 million and donate one million vaccines to confront the growing mpox epidemic in Africa.

But Mr. Biden must also confront the limits of his promise. All around him, there are problems yet to solve. In Gaza, a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas remains elusive after 11 months of fighting. Israel’s ferocious shelling of the militant group Hezbollah, which has brought mounting civilian casualties, was underway in Lebanon even as Mr. Biden spoke, threatening a multifront war in the Middle East. Gaza and Ukraine face worsening humanitarian crises.

“America’s back, all right — he can make that case — but with severe limitations on its capacity to lead,” said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East peace negotiator who has advised presidents of both parties. “Biden’s administration is a cautionary tale, I think, of just how complicated and surprising the international environment is, and the limitations of American power.”

When he hosts Mr. Zelensky at the White House on Thursday, Mr. Biden will come under new pressure to let Ukraine use American long-range missiles to strike deep into Russian territory — a step he has resisted, fearing it would put the United States into direct conflict with one of its two major nuclear-armed adversaries.

Mr. Zelensky has said that he is coming to the United States to present his “Plan for Victory,” and that Mr. Biden will be the first to see it. He will also meet with the two presidential candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump. “This war can’t be calmed by talks,” he said in a talk before the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday. “Action is needed.”

While Mr. Zelensky will speak to the entire General Assembly on Wednesday, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, was absent. Russia is being represented by its longtime foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov. Mr. Biden used his speech to take a shot at the Russian president, saying Mr. Putin’s war had already “failed at his core aim.”

China’s president, Xi Jinping, also skipped the annual event, meaning that the two major powers confronting the United States during Mr. Biden’s presidency will be barely heard. Mr. Biden made no mention of his efforts to keep China from obtaining advanced technology, or selling its most advanced high-tech products here in the United States. But he did give a nod to China’s cooperation with the United States to stop the flow of the deadly narcotic fentanyl. Later in the day, Mr. Biden addressed a global coalition to end synthetic drug threats.

“I appreciate the collaboration,” the president said, referring to China, in his U.N. speech. “It matters for the people of my country, many others around the world.”

Mr. Biden acknowledged that his time was short — he has only a few months left to tackle a series of grave global crises, and there is a significant risk that his vision of global alliances will be abandoned if Mr. Trump reassumes office in January. Reflecting on his first Senate election, in 1972, in the thick of the Cold War and with America still fighting in Vietnam, he said the nation was then at “an inflection point,” as it is today.

“I truly believe we’re in another inflection point in world history,” Mr. Biden said, repeating a line he has used often during his presidency. “The choices we make today will determine our future for decades to come.”

On the Middle East, Mr. Biden made a point of highlighting the civilian casualties.

“They didn’t ask for this war,” Mr. Biden said of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza, a mix of Hamas militants and those caught in the crossfire. He reiterated the need for Hamas and Israel to sign on to his cease-fire and hostage plan. But today, that agreement seems further away than ever, with the opening of a major new front in Lebanon.

With the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attack against Israel coming up in a few weeks, the president reiterated his long-held position that Israel has a right to defend itself.

“The world must not flinch from the horrors of Oct. 7,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “Any country would have the right and responsibility to ensure that such an attack could never happen again.”

Mr. Biden also devoted a significant portion of his speech to the promise and risks of artificial intelligence — a topic he referred to only fleetingly during his address to the General Assembly last year.

The technology brings promise, he said, “but A.I. also brings profound risks, from deep fakes to disinformation to novel pathogens to bio weapons.” This year, the General Assembly passed a resolution to start developing “global rules of the road” for A.I. — an initiative Mr. Biden said he welcomed.

Mr. Biden has spent more than 50 years on the world stage — as a senator, including a stint as the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, as vice president and as president. Reflecting on time, he spoke of the lessons he has learned. One of them, he said, is that “things can get better.”

He ticked off a string of examples: recovery from the Vietnam War; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the end of apartheid in South Africa; the world’s emergence from the coronavirus pandemic. He spoke of ongoing battles for “freedom and justice and dignity” in places like Venezuela and also Uganda, where gay, lesbian and transgender people have fought for their rights.

“Every age faces its challenges,” Mr. Biden said. “I saw it as a young man. I see it today. But we are stronger than we think. We’re stronger together than alone.”

When the speech was over, the president paused to take in the applause. Then he put his hand on his heart, gave a brief wave and walked off the stage — his fourth and final address to the United Nations General Assembly behind him.