Wednesday Briefing – The New York Times

Zelensky urged NATO to do more in a Times interview

President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the U.S. and Europe to do more to defend Ukraine, in a wide-ranging interview with The Times. He proposed that NATO planes shoot down Russian missiles in Ukrainian airspace.

“What’s the problem?” Zelensky said during the interview on Monday in Kyiv. “Why can’t we shoot them down? Is it defense? Yes. Is it an attack on Russia? No. Are you shooting down Russian planes and killing Russian pilots? No. So what’s the issue with involving NATO countries in the war? There is no such issue.”

That kind of direct NATO involvement, which analysts say could provoke Russia to retaliate, has been resisted in Western capitals. Zelensky drew a comparison to how the U.S. and Britain helped Israel shoot down a barrage of drones and missiles from Iran last month.

Zelensky said he had also appealed to senior U.S. officials to allow Ukraine to fire U.S. missiles and other weaponry at military targets inside Russia, a tactic the U.S. continues to oppose. The inability to do so, he said, gave Russia a “huge advantage” in cross-border warfare that it is exploiting with assaults in Ukraine’s northeast.

Zelensky spoke with a mixture of frustration and bewilderment at the West’s reluctance to take bolder steps to ensure that Ukraine wins the war.

His pleas came at a critical time for Ukraine’s war effort. Its army is in retreat and a new package of U.S. arms has yet to arrive in sufficient quantities. Not since the early days of the war has Ukraine faced as grave a military challenge, analysts say.

“Shoot down what’s in the sky over Ukraine,” Zelensky said. “And give us the weapons to use against Russian forces on the borders.”

Read a transcript of the interview.

Funeral events began for Iran’s president

Videos posted by Iranian news agencies showed crowds lining the street yesterday in Tabriz, a city in northwestern Iran, for a procession carrying the flag-draped coffins of President Ebrahim Raisi, his foreign minister and six others killed in a helicopter crash on Sunday.

The procession in Tabriz was the first in a series of official events to bid farewell to Raisi, a hard-line cleric who was widely viewed as a potential successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader.

The country is grappling with the shock of losing two of its top leaders at such a volatile moment. Now, Khamenei is weighing options for how to move forward with elections and to rebuild the country’s leadership structure.

He must choose between opening the race and facing moderate rivals, or limiting candidates and risking the embarrassment of low voter turnout, my colleague Erika Solomon reports.

The U.S. halted a Guantánamo transfer

The Biden administration was poised to send about a dozen detainees at Guantánamo Bay to Oman for resettlement last year. Then, Hamas attacked Israel, and the U.S. abruptly halted the secret operation.

None of the Yemeni prisoners had ever been charged with crimes, and all of them had been cleared for transfer by national security review panels. A military plane was already on the runway, ready to airlift them.

But Democrats raised concerns about the potential for instability in the Middle East after the Oct. 7 attack, U.S. officials said. The arrangements are still under review, my colleague Carol Rosenberg reports.

MORE TOP NEWS

“Kairos,” a novel by Jenny Erpenbeck about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won the International Booker Prize yesterday. The chair of the judges said that the relationship in the book and the couple’s “descent into a destructive vortex” tracked the history of East Germany before the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Erpenbeck shares the award with Michael Hofmann, who translated the book into English. It’s the first novel originally written in German to win the award.

Read our review and a profile of Erpenbeck.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

SPORTS NEWS

Scarlett Johansson takes on OpenAI

OpenAI asked Scarlett Johansson, who played the virtual assistant in the movie “Her,” to consider licensing her voice for a virtual assistant. Johansson said no twice.

But last week, the company released a chatbot with a voice that Johansson said sounded “eerily similar to mine.” She hired a lawyer and asked OpenAI to stop using the voice, called Sky.

The company suspended its release of Sky over the weekend. OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, said that “the voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers.”

Johansson is the latest high-profile person to accuse OpenAI of using creative work without permission. The company has been sued for copyright violations by authors, actors and newspapers, including The Times, which sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft.

That’s it for today’s briefing. Thank you for spending part of your morning with us, and see you tomorrow. — Justin

P.S. The Athletic expanded its tennis coverage.

You can reach Justin and the team at [email protected].