For Zelensky, a Celebration of Resilience and a Sales Pitch for Support

A bit of nervous laughter swept through the House chamber.

He was, of course, turning to the real reason for his visit. From the start of the conflict, Mr. Zelensky seemed to intuit that he needed to be more than an inspiring leader — he needed to be an arms importer, coaxing out of the Biden administration longer-range weapons that could inflict on Russia the kind of damage it has wrought, with fiery efficiency, on Ukrainian civilian critical infrastructure. And by any measure he has been successful, gradually getting ever more powerful offensive and defensive weapons, even as Mr. Biden has withheld the F-16s and Abrams tanks.

On Wednesday evening, Mr. Zelensky tried to appeal to the minority of Republicans who are reluctant to spend more in a conflict whose end is nowhere in sight. He raised the surprising new role of Iran, whose provision of drones helped bail out Russian forces who were running out of precision weapons.

“It is just a matter of time when they will strike against your other allies,” Mr. Zelensky said, a clear reference to Israel. It was a subtle way of saying that the war is not just Ukraine’s fight, but part of Washington’s long standoff with a state sponsor of terror that is edging closer than ever to the capability — if not necessarily the intent — to build nuclear weapons.

With that one line, he married Ukraine’s recent confrontation with Iran over drones to Washington’s longstanding one over the Iranian nuclear program, part of his strategy of describing the war in his country as something bigger, a battle over preserving democracy and the post-Cold War world order.

And he made clear, without quite saying so, that the biggest mistake now would be to give Mr. Putin what the Russian autocrat most desires: time to let brutally low temperatures, extensive blackouts, water shortages and a campaign of terror from the sky break Ukraine’s will and fragment a surprisingly united Europe.

“Russia is using winter as a weapon,’’ Mr. Biden said at his news conference with Mr. Zelensky at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, saying Russia was “freezing people, starving people, cutting them off from one another.”