Brad Raffensperger is all too familiar with attempts to subvert US democracy.

The Secretary of State for Georgia was on the receiving end of the infamous Donald Trump phone call after the 2020 election, when the then-president urged his fellow Republican to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win the state. Raffensperger refused and death threats ensued.

Almost four years on from the unrest that followed the last presidential election, Raffensperger is again in the crosshairs of the Trump faithful, as he battles a Maga-friendly majority on the swing state’s election board who passed last-minute laws that critics claim will pave the way for post-election legal chaos, if not violent unrest.

“There are a lot of bad actors out there,” Raffensperger acknowledged as he visited a polling station in DeKalb County this week for a “security health check”, a live test of one of the big-screen voting machines that will be used across Georgia on the November 5 election. “That’s why we need people that are going to stand their ground no matter what.”

If the loudest election deniers in the Republican party are to be believed, there will be plenty for Raffensperger to resist.

He and others in the state are in a battle to prevent ‘bad actors’ from undermining the vote in Georgia, both through public education about voting systems and by rolling out security measures, including panic buttons, for poll workers and training in using antidotes for poisoning.

Simultaneously, officials at the county level “are trying to lay the groundwork to dispute the election results in Georgia if former president Trump loses,” said Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew).

Their goal is to use allegations of fraud as a “pretext” for election deniers who would then refuse to ratify the results from Georgia on January 6 2025, he added, in what “would literally be history repeating itself”.

Trump has foreshadowed such an outcome. “We have to make sure that we stop [Democrats] from cheating,” he said at an Atlanta rally in August. He then praised three of five members of the state election board as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory”.

The trio, who were appointed by Republicans, have pushed through a last-minute rule change that allows local election officials to halt the certification of election results in order to conduct a “reasonable inquiry”, without defining what reasonable might look like.

The board on Friday introduced a rule that all ballots in Georgia must be hand-counted — a move that campaigners warned was unlawful and unworkable, and could delay the election result for weeks. Raffensperger has accused the board of introducing “eleventh-hour chaos”, but he has no power to reverse their decisions.

A report published by Crew last month found that at least eight election officials in Georgia had refused to certify election results since 2020, the most of any swing state since the last cycle. They all remain in their positions.

With fewer than 50 days to go to the election, and Trump and Kamala Harris neck-and-neck in the Georgia polls, Raffensperger has embarked on a tour of more than two dozen counties to reassure the 5mn voters expected in the state that their votes will be safe.

Alongside technicians working for his office, he painstakingly demonstrates how the Dominion Voting Systems devices used in Georgia — themselves the target of conspiracy theories — are protected from hackers and illegal tampering, and how votes are digitally counted and cross referenced.

“There is a process in place and it has worked well in the past,” the 69-year-old former engineer said, in his soothing Southern drawl. He insisted local election officials have no discretion to stop certification. “When you come to the following Monday, the state law says you must, counties shall certify the election . . . that’s right there in black letter law.”

The Harris campaign, among others, is challenging the state election board’s new rules in court, with a trial set to begin next month.

Pro-democracy activists have expressed faith in the legal system to prevent attempts to delay results. Efforts to undermine the vote “will ultimately fail because of the robust protections in place and because journalists, pro-democracy advocates, and voters are watching closely,” said Justin Berger, a Georgia lawyer working for advocacy group Informing Democracy.

Crew said any election official who refuses to certify election results can expect to be sued “immediately” by well-prepared attorneys.

But Berger warned of an ominous “change of tactics” in the run-up to the 2024 vote. “It’s not so much a full-frontal assault as it is guerrilla warfare, because [the election deniers] win if they just create uncertainty . . . all it took was some manufactured uncertainty [in 2020] and we had January 6,” he said of the 2021 attack on Capitol Hill.

Although Georgia has more election deniers in crucial positions than elsewhere, they are making inroads in other swing states, including Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Marc Elias, a lawyer who successfully fought more than 60 lawsuits brought by election deniers in the aftermath of the 2020 vote and now works for the Harris campaign, has warned Republicans are “building an election subversion war machine” and are “far more organised” than four years ago.

As well as installing election deniers in key election administration roles, groups who promoted conspiracy theories after the 2020 vote have attempted to disqualify tens of thousands of voters in key states, in so-called mass voter challenges, claiming the rolls are full of dead people, illegal aliens, or Americans who have moved to other states.

Even if such efforts have been largely unsuccessful, there are mounting fears of voter intimidation and the targeting of poll workers.

A recent poll found almost 30 per cent of Republicans with favourable views of Trump want armed citizens to take over as poll watchers.

In Georgia, where two poll workers were hounded out of their homes and jobs after being falsely accused of fraud by then Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani after the last election, Raffensperger’s office has handed out lanyards with panic buttons to individuals working in precincts across the state.

Election supervisors have also been trained to use Narcan, an antidote to opioid poisoning, after fentanyl-laced letters were sent to the Fulton county board of elections office.

In an attempt to shore up confidence in the voting process, Georgia has joined forces with the “Vet the Vote” campaign, which encourages veterans to become poll workers, in the hope they will be trusted by voters across the political divide.

But Raffensperger is under no illusions that such measures will convert those who believe the conspiracy theories touted by members of his own party.

“Some people just can’t believe that their candidate has come up short,” he said. “I’ve been very clear that no matter how you look at it, there was a race back in 2020 and the 227 Republican congressmen all got more votes in all of their districts than president Trump did. And in Georgia, we saw the same thing . . . People just left the top of the ticket blank.”

Despite coming under repeated attack from Trump, who claimed at the Atlanta rally that Raffensperger was doing “everything possible to make 2024 difficult for Republicans to win”, the secretary enjoys a higher approval rating in Georgia than the former president.

“People know no matter what, I’m going to do my job,” Raffensperger said, even as he lamented that his “microphone’s not big enough” to drown out voices seeking to inject doubt about the integrity of Georgia’s elections.

When asked what would happen if a large number of counties refused to certify the vote in November, Raffensperger smiled ruefully. “Then the judges will be busy.”

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I love Steve Coogan. I first saw him the night after he won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh in 1992 where he was appearing as one of his many alter egos, the Mancunian bombshell Pauline Calf. He was scorchingly hilarious, and I’ve been an ardent fan ever since. 

To my mind, Coogan’s most famous creation, the quintessential Little Englander and broadcaster Alan Partridge, remains one of the funniest characters on television, eclipsed only by Coogan’s turn as Himself in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip. I have an infantile weakness for anyone who can do impressions, and enjoy few things in life so much as watching the actor “doing” Roger Moore. Next month sees Coogan in his first major West End role in a restaging of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, another collaboration with Armando Iannucci with whom he has worked for 30 years. He takes time out from rehearsals to talk about the undertaking, which will see him take on four roles (compared to Peter Sellers’ threesome), and a career that has seen him switch between high comedy and more serious parts.

Lately, Coogan has become a style icon – or at least his wardrobe has come to represent a style that typifies the British male. The crumpled linens, tan blazers and Ray-Bans of The Trip were the focus of much discussion about the modern wardrobe, and what might be appropriate for the mature man to wear. For this reason, I’m delighted that he should feature in this autumn’s men’s style issue, which I hope will be a useful and approachable guide. 

Why not make clothes that people actually want to wear?

In our tailor’s directory, for example, we unpick the bewildering range of services in London dedicated to the making of a suit. While many of our readers are keen to try bespoke suiting, many report feeling overwhelmed when trying to work out who and what will fit them best. Are they looking for something traditional and highly structured, or are they in search of something softer, lighter and with more slouch? Aleks Cvetkovic has put together an index that we hope may help. From the lean, lengthening lines of Edward Sexton to the regal cuts of Kent & Haste, we hope this answers everything you wanted to know about suiting but were afraid to ask.

Not in the market for a three-piece? Maybe a black hoodie is more your vibe. Mark C O’Flaherty has found out how the sporty basic has become akin to haute couture. Likewise, at Sunspel, the T-shirt specialists are debuting a bespoke service to help men (and women) find the perfect fit. We’ve sent Louis Wise to test it out. 

In the 13 years since founding his men’s ready-to-wear label Ami Paris, Alexandre Mattiussi has introduced womenswear, accessories, leather goods and jewellery, and turned his business into a global €300mn brand. His recipe for success has been the provision of a core line in utilitarian trousers, shirts and basics at an aspirational price point. His trousers especially come highly recommended by many of my peers. 

“I’m not a niche designer, I’m not an intellectual designer, I’m not a conceptual designer,” he tells Jessica Beresford. “I want to dress the maximum amount of people I can, in a very inclusive way.” Ami’s success reveals a truth within the industry that many brands don’t seem to hear. Why not make clothes that people actually want to wear?

Lastly, our cover story takes you on a journey across Croatia, aboard the Jadrolinija ferry with Leon Dame. It’s always a delight to feature my favourite supermodel on these pages: Dame is one of the only people in the world who could wear a bin bag and still look super-chic. 

@jellison22

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The Bank of London will cut nearly 15 per cent of its workforce as part of a wider restructuring of the fledgling bank that received £42mn from investors last month.

The bank, which counts US finance heavyweight Harvey Schwartz and Labour grandee Lord Peter Mandelson on its parent’s board, told staff this week that it would make redundant about 20 of its employees, including at executive level, said two people familiar with the cuts.

The redundancies come as the bank faces pressure from investors to overhaul its operations after it closed its fundraising, said four people familiar with the situation.

A restructuring of the company was discussed as one of the things that investors wanted before committing to the fundraising, said three people close to the bank.

The financing was led by existing investor Mangrove Capital, whose founder, Mark Tluszcz, is also a non-executive director at the bank. He did not respond to request for comment.

The deal was announced shortly after the bank’s parent company received a winding-up petition from tax authorities over unpaid debt, which came days after its founder Anthony Watson stepped down as chief executive.

The bank attributed the petition from HM Revenue & Customs to an “administrative error” and it has since been resolved. The bank said at the time that the fundraising was unrelated to the petition, which has been withdrawn.

The bank — which aims to make money from payment services and by franchising its technology to allow corporate clients to offer regulated banking services under their own brands — had in July called on investors for more money, saying it had an “immediate” need to raise millions of pounds of cash for regulatory capital, the Financial Times has previously reported.

A spokesperson for the bank said: “Following its successful fundraising and under new leadership, the Bank of London is focusing on its home market of the UK and aligning its resources to support its strategic objectives.”

“As part of this process, the Bank has launched a consultation that may result in a small number of roles being impacted, relative to the total number of staff across its three offices,” the person said, adding the “decision has not been made lightly”.

The company counted about 150 employees before the restructuring according to people familiar with the matter. The bank declined to confirm its total number of employees.

A technology investor called Nasser Hadadi played a key role in leading negotiations on behalf of investors, according to four people familiar with the situation.

Hadadi, who is a French citizen according to corporate filings, has invested a relatively small sum personally, one of the people added, but was chosen by some of the bank’s investors to represent their interests in discussions with management.

The departures, which will mainly affect UK-based staff, follow an initial round of job cuts in the US earlier this month, where the bank leases offices that sit largely empty in New York and North Carolina.

The Bank of London is separately being sued in the High Court in London by a technology company over alleged unpaid debts as far back as 2022. Court records show that Smart Trade Technologies, a provider of electronic trading and payments platforms, has demanded £1.46mn from the bank including interest and damages.

The claimant said in a lawsuit filed in May that the bank had signed up in 2021 for LiquidityFX, Smart Trade’s foreign exchange trading platform. But it claimed that while the Bank of London paid a set-up fee and for the first year of the service, the bank failed to make subsequent payments required under a five-year contract.

The Bank of London said: “This claim relates to a minor commercial dispute in respect of which we have a robust defence which we fully expect to succeed.”

Additional reporting by Robert Smith in London

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At first glance Jack Schlossberg seems like your average Ivy League lunkhead. Tall and handsome, his lanky six-foot-two frame has rangy athleticism, he boasts a thatch of hair that geneticists should task with study and he can always bust a camera-ready, doe-eyed, heartbreaker grin. He’s urban, he’s part of the liberal cognoscenti; he skates about the parks like a real New Yorker in his singlet, cap set backwards with its peak against his nape. 

Take a closer look, however, and you start to see the resemblance: the chiselled cheekbones, the glowering brow. He has all the hallmarks of his ancestral bloodline. Jack Schlossberg is unmistakably a Kennedy.

John “Jack” Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg was born in 1993, the youngest child of Caroline Kennedy and designer and artist Edwin Schlossberg. He is named after his maternal grandfather, the 35th US president John F Kennedy. Ted Kennedy was his godfather and great uncle. He bears an uncanny likeness to his uncle, John F Kennedy Jr, the attorney, socialite and publisher who died in 1999. Schlossberg was a ring bearer at JFK Jr’s wedding, and shares the same proclivity for writing and wearing not too many clothes.

Schlossberg has degrees from Yale and Harvard in history, law and business administration, briefly worked in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs and has turned his hand to journalism. He’s written for the Washington Post, New York magazine and People but his chief achievement since graduation has been creating content and cultivating his social media presence with a slew of TikTok films. Some half a million followers now tune in regularly to watch him singing ditties from behind the steering wheel, cogitating on the park run, providing “hot takes” about Big Tech and, increasingly, “memeing for democracy”.

Some observers might find Schlossberg a bit peculiar, his goofy brand of humour comes across as slightly odd. Watching him crooning feels like being on a Tinder date that you’d like to exit. And I think it’s a red flag he doesn’t like to shower, wash his hair or brush his teeth. But in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the 31-year-old has been adopted to help explain politics to the young and disaffected. US Vogue signed him up as a political correspondent in July, while Kamala HQ has been using him as an interlocutor to get the vote out and energise Gen Z. 

His content is now pivoting away from moochy explainer videos to find him chatting deep dish pizza and policy with Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, hanging out with swing-state senators and doing porch-side interviews with major figures in the Democrat community. His access is formidable: most Democratic elders seem to treat him as you might a hyperactive nephew — an inevitable fixture whom you are fond of but sometimes wish would go away. Schlossberg carries with him the golden privilege of being a Kennedy. He may be a smelly skater-boi crossed with a puppy, but he’s still a scion of the mythic Camelot. He got the chance to remind everybody of that connection at the Democratic National Conference, in Chicago, during which he gave a two-minute speech. He told the assembly why his grandfather was his “hero”: because “he inspired a new generation to ask what they could do for our country. Today, JFK’s call to action is now ours.” 

Schlossberg may lead with a unique brand of “silly goose”, but of the current crop of Kennedys he’s probably the sane one. Few things are stranger than the spectacle of his cousin Robert F Kennedy Jr’s late career in politics: the now retired presidential candidate and Trump supporter revealed this week he is being investigated for collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago: he cut its head off with a chainsaw and then bungee-roped it to the family car. Following the brain worm, and the story of the dead bear cub (he planned to skin it but then dumped it in Central Park, you remember?), and an allegation of sexual assault (over which he apologised without admitting guilt), RFK Jr’s reputation for being a bit zany has now been reclassified as dangerously mad. 

Jackie Kennedy may have coined the expression Camelot to help mythologise her late husband’s presidency, but the myth gets ever stranger and more powerful by the year. One wonders whether a Kennedy can ever be an ordinary mortal or must always cultivate an outsize personality to live up to their famous name. Schlossberg is harnessing more statesmanlike authority while cruising on his hunky affability and adjacent fame. His schtick can feel as though it has been cynically workshopped to “play” with next gen voters, but at other times his uncensored edits seem spectacularly untamed. 

As a representative of Camelot 2.0 he ticks all the boxes. He’s politically aspirational, charming, non-confrontational and looks cute in a suit and in running shorts. For a voting sector that has been put off by the relentless negativity of recent politics, Schlossberg is the perfect spokesman: he sandwiches his easy-peasy calls to action — “vote blue” (hell, you don’t even need to know the names on the ballot), “reproductive freedom”, “don’t cry, vote!” — and then gets back to the stuff of life, like moonwalking in the supermarkets in his filthy dirty socks.

And, yes, he isn’t hugely funny, or even amusing, but he’s got that rare ancestral glow. Camelot 2.0 is the same but different and while our collective weakness for Kennedy connections might smooth his transition into more serious politics, as with so many of his brethren it’s hard to work out where the focus starts and the charisma ends.  

jo.ellison@ft.com

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My family moved recently. A change of address occasions much administrative work, one task of which was to calculate the value of the art collection my husband and I have cobbled together. Seems likely I was displacing some emotion — leaving our home of 14 years was not easy — but this exercise made me philosophical. I could enumerate the prices I had paid for various works; I could extrapolate about the current art market by checking recent auction results. But what did that tell me? The insurance company wanted to know about dollar amounts, but I was stuck on the thornier question of value.

Seven years ago, I saw a retrospective of the artist Agnes Martin, at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. I was familiar with Martin’s minimalist paintings, which I admired, and was unprepared to be surprised by the exhibition, let alone deeply moved. I love the experience of communion with films, books, canvases on the wall, but I am rarely overcome by it, and certainly did not expect to cry over an artist known for her cool geometries. But there we were, my companion and I, considering Martin’s final finished painting with tears in our eyes. 

I’ve tried to make sense of my state on this day. I was hungry, or tired, or thirsty, or some combination of these — my diagnosis when dealing with my children’s emotional outbursts. Maybe Frank Lloyd Wright’s building had something to do with it, the pitch of the floor making me feel unsteady, the open rotunda making me feel dizzy. Or my response was purely emotional — I’d have to be made of stone to feel nothing after hearing the sobering facts of Martin’s life. Perhaps all this is true, or a factor, anyway, in my tears. 

It’s also possible that I experienced something too rare in my secular life in our profane culture — call it the sacred. Already a cliché to say museums are modern cathedrals, built to dwarf the body and awe the senses; worth pointing out that quiet contemplation of anything that’s not my iPhone feels profound, and that the progress I made up the ramp of the Guggenheim was rather like the devout Catholic’s observation of the Stations of the Cross.

I think art is one of the last provinces of the sacred for me, maybe for most of us. A work of art’s price can’t tell us anything about it, and there’s no point in talking about art in terms of dollars or euro or yen, but perhaps there’s no other metric available to us.

The most expensive thing I’ve ever bought is a painting. It’s a small work, a minor effort by one of the world’s most celebrated artists. I bought it at auction, spending far more than I had intended to, caught up in the competitive fervour, my desire for this work somehow apart from what I would pay for it, by the magical thinking that governs most of my shopping. The way my insurance company judges this untitled painting’s worth is by referring to the record of what I spent on it. That’s the market in a nutshell; things are worth what someone is willing to pay.

When I look at this painting, I don’t think about that number. I think about what a genius can do with paint, and I think about this particular genius’s ability to make images that are at once horrific and beautiful, and I think about the hands of this particular genius touching this artefact that I now possess. But I’m not an underwriter. 

This is the most expensive painting in our collection, but I don’t know if it follows that it is also the most valuable. I have a framed watercolour that my older son did when he was three — bless the Montessori teachers who wrote the date on it. It’s a splash of light blue and is, according to the artist, a whale. Children’s art rarely looks like what it’s meant to depict, but in this case, the thing, perhaps only accidentally, truly resembles a breaching whale. Obviously, there’s no way to convert sentimental value into actual currency. 

It’s a great privilege that I’m in a position to spend any money on art, though I possess more sentiment than currency. It’s still possible to buy the work of artists at the start of their career, or editions by more well-known names at small auction houses, or even minor work by true masters.

I think about the money, because I’m working within the constraints of a budget, but only when I’m in the act of transaction. Then I forget that altogether. I cannot, as George Lucas did, spend $15mn on a painting by Robert Colescott. I could, though, spend about one month’s rent on a small, early work by the same artist. Living with it affords me a pleasure to which I cannot affix a price tag, even though my insurer has asked me to.

Sometimes a work of art is described as priceless. In my imagination this implies more zeroes than one can count, but it’s more accurate to say that with art, numbers aren’t salient. We should call a masterpiece unpriceable instead. 

Still, money is so essential a factor of contemporary existence that we cannot help but bring it in. Money borders — even if it should not enter — some of life’s most serious provinces. Family life, religious faith and romantic love may be all that are left to us that are exempt from the logic of buying and selling. 

Sometimes a work of art is described as ‘priceless’, but with art, numbers aren’t salient. We should call a masterpiece ‘unpriceable’ instead 

The art market is one matter, but even the urge to photograph or otherwise document a museum visit, very common at the moment, is, I think, an economic activity. We reach for our phones from some insipid urge to participate in a culture too attuned to pointless connectivity, yes. But to Instagram a Pollock or a Van Gogh transforms that moment of pleasure into work. We think this ennobling; it’s sadly debased. 

I don’t know whether it’s fair to consider faith a realm wholly uncorrupted by money — it’s certainly possible to enumerate the assets of, say, the Catholic Church (some of which are what we would call priceless). Nevertheless, art can provide an encounter with the mysterious, a territory that borders the mystical. Perhaps that is why I so often find it a balm. 

Only a few months ago, on a day I found personally difficult, I fled to the Museum of Modern Art in need of distraction or solace. I saw an exhibition by the video and performance artist Joan Jonas. I spent a surprisingly long time watching black-and-white footage of a performance she’d staged decades ago, in the then-wasteland of lower Manhattan. In those minutes, I truly forgot the worries that had sent me to the museum in the first place.

Last summer, I pulled some strings and was invited behind the scenes at Christie’s Rockefeller Center outpost. I was writing a book in which one character, a billionaire, buys a painting by Helen Frankenthaler. (No deeper meaning in choosing this artist than the personal, as she’s one of my favourite abstract expressionists.) I wanted to see the rooms to which serious collectors are sometimes invited to kick the tyres of the masterpieces they might buy. 

A Christie’s staffer led me down a long hall, threw open massive doors to intimate, soundless rooms, simply but strongly lit, containing nothing at all. I thought they felt like chapels. I loved imagining the Warhols and Picassos that had once stood there, ready for inspection. 

My guide seemed surprised to discover that the last room we entered was not empty at all. In my recall, it, too, was bright and silent, but there, on the wall, was a painting. It sounds like something out of fiction but it’s true; it was by Frankenthaler. There are many words applicable: happenstance, coincidence, luck, kismet.

I find that when I’m immersed in the writing of a novel there will be uncanny resonances in my real life. I’ll be served a meal like one I imagined, or meet someone with the same name as a character I invented. There’s no deeper meaning in it, just a funny thing that has happened to me often enough that I understand it as part of the novel-writing process. Maybe this is part of the experience of seeing art, too. There’s some frisson that can’t be put into words, a sense of recognition or kinship. 

I don’t know what happened to the Frankenthaler I saw that day. (Christie’s sold a Frankenthaler this spring for more than $4mn, but that’s a detail of interest mostly, I think, to insurance companies.) I like to imagine the person who bought it: that they went into the very room I did, that they smiled with some private pleasure at the thought of being alone with this painting. I like to imagine that they knew and cared about Frankenthaler, that they were tempted to touch the painting, that they had questions about its provenance, that they got close enough to the canvas to smell the paint itself.

I like to imagine that moment brought them joy, a joy they feel every time they glimpse the painting, wherever they’ve chosen to hang it. I cannot bear to think that it went into storage, or hangs in a guest bedroom in a rarely visited vacation home. I prefer to imagine it is with someone who would agree with me that art’s value is not calculable, albeit someone with enough money to say something like this and still be taken seriously. I’d like to tell that painting’s owner how I stole two minutes alone with their painting, and I like to imagine they’d know that is worth everything.

Rumaan Alam’s new novel ‘Entitlement’ is published by Bloomsbury

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy will press Joe Biden for binding security guarantees before the US president leaves office to bolster Ukraine’s position and compel Russia to join peace talks.

The Ukrainian leader has in recent months stepped up preparations for possible negotiations with Moscow in anticipation of a shift in US policy following November’s presidential election.

Zelenskyy ordered an invasion of the Kursk region of Russia in August to gain territory as leverage in future talks and has said he is ready for a peace conference with Moscow’s involvement.

Speaking to journalists ahead of a US trip next week where he will attend the UN General Assembly and hold talks with Biden, Zelenskyy said he would present a “victory plan” to the US president that he hoped would end the war.

Zelenskyy said the plan, which he wants to be implemented by the end of December, would strengthen Ukraine and force Russia to the negotiating table.

“The victory plan, this bridge to strengthening Ukraine, can contribute to more productive future diplomatic meetings with Russia,” said Zelenskyy on Friday afternoon in Kyiv.

He described the initiative as Biden’s opportunity to go down in history as the president who secured Ukrainian independence. He emphasised that the plan needed to be implemented before Biden left office in January.

“I think this is a historical mission,” said Zelenskyy. “Let’s do all this today, while all the officials who want the victory of Ukraine are in official positions.”

Ukraine has lost territory daily to Russia this year and Moscow has shown no sign that it was willing to negotiate.

The Ukrainian leader outlined the four points of the “victory plan” but declined to go into detail.

The first point, he said, were further security guarantees. Ukraine has recently signed long-term commitments with the US and other western allies but wants harder assurances akin to the mutual defence guarantee that comes with Nato membership.

The second was Ukraine’s Kursk operation, which he said was “fulfilling” its task of diverting Russian offensive power.

Zelenskyy’s third request was for “specific” advanced weapons. He did not elaborate on the type of weapons system he wanted. The fourth was the joint development of Ukraine’s economy together with its partners.

“Today you help us in the implementation of this plan and in the future Ukraine will save you a lot of your resources,” said Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy does not view the “victory plan” as a replacement for his “peace formula”, a 10-point initiative based on the UN Charter that lays out a framework for a lasting settlement.

Rather, it will give Ukraine what it needs to get Russia to the negotiating table where the peace formula would be discussed, he said.

Zelenskyy again ruled out a Minsk-style peace agreement where the conflict would be frozen, stating that Russia would only invade again. “We need a just and stable peace,” said Zelenskyy.

Both Brazil and China have put forward alternative peace plans to Ukraine’s peace formula. Zelenskyy said these plans lacked detail and worked as “political icebreakers” against the UN Charter.

After speaking at the UN on Wednesday in New York, Zelenskyy will travel to Washington to present the plan to Biden and Vice-president Kamala Harris, who is running against Donald Trump in November’s election.

He plans to meet Trump after his visit to Washington, he said.