In an exclusive interview on the latest Threat Status weekly podcast, Anastasia Radina, who heads the Ukrainian Parliament’s Anti-Corruption Committee, details her government’s efforts to root out graft amid scrutiny from Washington, which has provided billions of dollars in military, economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine since Russian military forces invaded the country.

Ms. Radina reflects on the case of former Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, who was fired last year by Mr. Zelensky after a series of corruption scandals. But she also delves into bigger geopolitical reasoning that she says should undergird ongoing Western support for Ukraine.

“It is not in the interest of the United States, specifically, to stop supporting Ukraine. Why? Because we are not talking about just Russia’s war against Ukraine,” she says. “We’re talking about an axis of evil, which includes Russia, China, Iran, North Korea. We’re seeing supplies from these countries attacking Ukraine and if Russia does not receive a proper reaction to what it is doing in Ukraine? What kind of message would that send to China? What kind of message would that send to Iran? What kind of message would that send to peaceful citizens of Taiwan?”

Mr. Biden is attempting to clarify his policy on the Ukrainian military’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons for strikes on targets inside Russia.

Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s allegation this week of direct U.S. participation in the war, Mr. Biden insisted in an interview from France with ABC News Thursday that Ukraine is not authorized to strike Moscow with U.S. weapons — only targets inside Russia that are near the Ukrainian border.

“They’re authorized to be used in proximity to the border when they’re being used on the other side of the border to attack specific targets in Ukraine,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re not authorizing strikes 200 miles into Russia and we’re not authorizing strikes on Moscow, on the Kremlin.”

His comments dovetailed with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s assertion in an interview earlier Thursday with CNN that the new administration policy of allowing limited Ukrainian military strikes inside Russia with U.S.-supplied weapons will be “very, very helpful to the Ukrainians going forward.”

Surging right-wing parties are poised to make big gains as voters across the European Union head to the polls to elect a new European Parliament, but the consensus is unclear about how those gains will play out during a time of division and stress for the 27-nation bloc.

Foreign correspondents Eric J. Lyman and Andrea Pisani write in a Washington Times dispatch from Rome that conservative parties in the 27 European Union states differ on major issues, including relations with the U.S. and NATO, policy on Ukraine and Israel, defense spending, views of China, climate change and economics.

“The right-wing parties in France, Germany, Italy or Hungary, each of them has its own agendas and priorities,” says Sophia Russack, a researcher specializing in European Union issues with the Center for European Policy Studies, a Brussels-based think tank. “We have to remember that these are 27 different elections. The results are not aggregated.”

“Basically,” Ms. Russack tells The Times, “the only two areas where all the right-wing parties agree across the board are to limit migration coming into the EU and to limit the power of the European Union itself.”

Texas went before a federal appeals court Thursday to defend its own get-tough border policies, asking judges to revive an order preventing the Biden administration from slashing through its razor-wire border fence to help illegal immigrants enter the U.S.

Texas has placed more than 100 miles of razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande as part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s effort to plug gaps in the border he says have been opened by the Biden administration’s more relaxed approach. The Border Patrol then cut or smashed the wire in some locations.

A district court ruled the federal government was acting too aggressively in trampling on Texas, but that it had sovereign immunity so the lawsuit failed. A panel of the 5th Circuit disagreed and sided with Texas. The Supreme Court then stepped in and erased the injunction after the Biden administration sought to blame several drownings in the Rio Grande on the wire.

Texas has since argued that the Biden administration misled the justices over the deaths. The judges who heard the case Thursday — two Republican appointees and a Democratic appointee — did not give a clear indication of which way they are leaning.

Joseph R. DeTrani takes stock of China’s recent military aggression around Taiwan and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s carefully timed recent visit to Europe, writing that May was a busy month for Beijing in terms of international relations.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang met with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Seoul for a May 26-28 summit, the first of its kind since 2019, writes Mr. DeTrani, a former member of the Senior Intelligence Service of the CIA and a regular opinion contributor to Threat Status.

“An interesting and positive development was what China, South Korea and Japan said in paragraph 35 of the Joint Declaration of the summit: ‘We affirmed that maintaining peace, stability, and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia serves our common interest and is our common responsibility. We reiterated positions on regional peace and stability, denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the abductions issue, respectively,’” Mr. DeTrani writes.

“North Korea immediately responded, condemning China, Japan and South Korea for discussing denuclearization of the peninsula, calling their joint declaration a ‘grave political provocation’ that violates North Korea’s sovereignty,” he writes. “This was a rare criticism of China from North Korea; China is its only ally and its economic lifeline.”

• June 7 — Taiwan’s central role in the global economy, The Brookings Institution.

• June 7 — NATO in the New Era of Collective Defense, Hudson Institute.

• June 10 — U.S.-South Korea Bilateral Dialogue for Strengthening US-ROK Alliance, Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

• June 11 — Hostile Intent: UAE Subversion & Transnational Repression, International Human Rights Advisors.

• June 11 — A Pivotal Year: Assessing the Russia-Ukraine War in 2024, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

• June 12 — The New Iron Triangle: Achieving Adaptability and Scale in Defense Acquisition, Hudson Institute.

• June 14 — Preparing the Next Generation of Diplomats, U.S. Institute of Peace.