FASANO, Italy — President Joe Biden and fellow G7 leaders agree that China poses a grave threat to their economies.

But behind the group’s collective bravado on “getting tough” with China, the countries still have varying appetites for how far to actually go in challenging a world superpower — differences that some officials worry could dent the coalition’s ability to fend off Beijing’s advances.

The G7 on Friday will try to paper over those lingering divides, coalescing behind a series of initiatives aimed at ratcheting up attention on China’s trade and investment in developing countries around the globe.

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FASANO, Italy — President Joe Biden and his closest world allies have vowed to finance Ukraine’s fight against Russia for as long as it takes.

But as the war drags into its third year, the group is being forced to get creative.

Biden on Thursday will press G7 leaders to advance a complex plan to convert seized Russian assets into a new funding stream for Ukraine, freeing up billions of dollars to reinforce its defense in 2025 and beyond.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy celebrated security agreements and commitments reached at this year’s NATO Summit Wednesday, one day after publicly voicing his frustration with the alliance’s approach to engagement with Ukraine amid its ongoing war with Russia.

At a bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden in Vilnius, Lithuania, Zelenskyy, who attended the summit along with a delegation of Ukrainian officials, said the results of the summit were a win for Ukraine.

“I think by the end of summit, we have great unity from our leaders and the security guarantees — that is a success for this summit, I think so. It’s my opinion,” Zelenskyy said in response to a POLITICO reporter’s question Wednesday.

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President Joe Biden’s trip to Europe next week may feel familiar, coming under the shadow of an increasingly stalemated war.

But for administration officials and foreign policy experts, the five-day swing across the Atlantic has quickly taken on heightened import: a bit of high-wire act diplomacy that could profoundly impact international alliances and fundamentally alter the very course of the war itself. The opportunity is there, they argue.

“This is the weakest Putin has been since taking power,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a global risk assessment firm based in New York. “Those escalation concerns that existed when the war began have steadily diminished.”

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President Joe Biden is set to announce a new $375 million military aid package for Ukraine after meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart at the G7 summit in Japan this weekend, according to three U.S. and Ukrainian officials familiar with the discussions.

The package will include more artillery shells, armored vehicles and anti-tank weapons — all equipment that the U.S. and allies have supplied to Kyiv in the past, but will be much needed in the months of hard fighting expected this spring and summer. The officials were granted anonymity to speak about the discussions ahead of an announcement.

The news comes as the U.S. president signaled that he would greenlight the third-party transfer of American F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, telling his G7 counterparts overnight that he will support a joint international effort to train Ukrainian pilots on the aircraft.

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Progressive lawmakers renewed their call for President Joe Biden to bypass Congress to avert a default after the abrupt cancellation of debt ceiling talks on Friday.

But the White House remains resistant. It issued a subdued statement indicating it sees no reason to pull the plug on talks. And privately, its message has been even blunter.

Senior Biden officials have told progressive activists and lawmakers in recent days that they do not see the 14th Amendment — which says the "validity of the public debt" cannot be questioned — as a viable means of circumventing debt ceiling negotiations. They have argued that doing so would be risky and destabilizing, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

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HIROSHIMA, Japan — When President Joe Biden arrives here for the G-7 summit, he and other leaders will be focused as much — and maybe even more — on economic competition with China as they are with Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine.

Formed to foster cooperation among the world’s biggest economies, the G-7 has demonstrated its versatility as a geopolitical force and a new degree of unity in its response to the war. But now, with a sanctions regime in place, advanced weapons flowing to Ukraine and the fighting at something of a stalemate, there is less demand for the immediate attention of these leaders. And Japan, this year’s host, is eager to focus on economic competition and security in the Pacific, as well as — given the chosen location of Hiroshima — the necessity of preventing a new nuclear arms race.

But that doesn’t mean Ukraine will be off the table. The U.S. has put forth one policy proposal related to the war — one that could test the unanimity within the G-7. It involves trade.

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President Joe Biden arrived in Hiroshima, Japan, on Thursday for the G-7 summit, where he’ll meet with fellow leaders from some of the wealthiest nations in the world. Leaders from each of the seven countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. — are planning to attend the summit, which runs through Sunday.

The location — one of the two Japanese cities where the U.S. detonated an atomic bomb in 1945, killing hundreds of thousands — is no accident. It’s the hometown of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who sees a connection between the devastating bombing and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Ukraine will top the agenda again at this year’s summit, but other topics — and possibly, tensions — are expected to arise.

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HIROSHIMA, Japan — At his first G-7 summit two summers ago along the sandy English beaches of Cornwall, President Joe Biden vowed that the U.S. was ready to lead again on the world stage.

Whatever initial skepticism met those sunny pronouncements faded in the weeks and months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as the G-7 — with the U.S. playing a leading role — mounted a robust and largely unified response.

But now, as Biden takes off Wednesday for his third G-7 summit, it’s Washington giving the other leaders heartburn.

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President Joe Biden will head to Japan this week to attend the G-7 summit but said he will cut short the remainder of his trip abroad so he can return to Washington “to be back for the final negotiations with congressional leaders” over the debt ceiling.

The president is scheduled to leave Wednesday for Hiroshima. He had planned to make visits afterward to Papua New Guinea and then to the Quad Summit in Australia. Biden will instead return to Washington on Sunday.

The stops in Australia and Papua New Guinea were meant to affirm the U.S. commitment to the Pacific as China’s influence in the region rises. Biden said he had already spoken with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to explain why he was postponing his visit.

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WARSAW — Eleven months ago, President Joe Biden came to Poland to denounce a war he’d hoped to avoid. On Tuesday, he returned having fully embraced the mantle of wartime leader, boasting of a U.S.-led Western response that blunted Vladimir Putin’s invasion and slowed the march of global authoritarianism.

Having stood in sunny and free Kyiv the day before — nearly a year after the war began — Biden in Warsaw was steeled for a fight he intends to see through while in the Oval Office. He may not be commanding troops in this battle, but he is acting like democracy’s civilian general, commanding an alliance strung together by geography, fear and necessity.

“NATO is more united and more unified than ever before,” Biden said. “The democracies of the world have grown stronger, not weaker. The autocrats of the world have grown weaker, not stronger.”

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President Joe Biden and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are slated to attend next month’s G-20 summit in Indonesia, setting up the possibility of a high-stakes face off in the midst of an increasingly deadly Moscow invasion of Ukraine.

U.S. officials are taking steps to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Biden last week opened the door to meeting Putin at the summit for a chance to negotiate the freedom of American prisoners, including WNBA star Brittney Griner. But there are no discussions underway with the Kremlin to make a deal happen and that seems unlikely to change, according to multiple administration officials not authorized to publicly discuss private negotiations.

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The U.S. is wading deeper into Russia’s war on Ukraine on multiple fronts, even as the president and the Senate Armed Services Committee chair liken the conflict to the height of the Cold War.

Days after Ukraine is alleged to have bombed the sole bridge linking Crimea to Russia and Moscow responded with missile attacks on more than 20 Ukrainian cities, a senior U.S. official confirmed Tuesday that sending advanced air defenses to Kyiv is now the top priority of Ukraine’s Western backers. The announcement followed President Joe Biden’s pledge to offer such assistance in a call with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy.

At the United Nations this week, American diplomats are lobbying countries to support a resolution rebuking Russia for its claim to have annexed four Ukrainian territories. A vote is expected Wednesday.

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MADRID — For nearly a week, President Joe Biden was the star attraction at a pair of European summits, hailed as a steadfast ally while he espoused the vital need for democracies to band together against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

But once Air Force One touched down in Washington late Thursday, Biden returned to a starkly different political reality.

The days Biden spent at the G-7 gathering in Germany and the NATO summit in Spain provided a brief oasis for the president, who must confront soaring inflation, surging gas prices, questions about his political future and a rage from his own party about a series of Supreme Court rulings. Despite the domestic turmoil, and dismal poll numbers, Biden rejected the notion that the nation was being doubted on the world stage.

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MADRID — NATO came together in a rare wartime meeting this week and showed a united front on arming and supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia, naming China as an economic and diplomatic threat — that is also rapidly building up its military — and trying to make the alliance better able to respond to any Russian incursions.

And let's not forget Turkey’s last-second agreement to approve allowing Finland and Sweden into the alliance.

All of that and more was packed into about 48 hours of closed-door meetings, news conferences, sideline chats, dinners and pledges to remain united against Russia both militarily and economically, as gas and agricultural prices continue to rise.

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The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday announced new sanctions targeting Russia's defense industrial base and said the United States — along with three G-7 members: the U.K., Canada and Japan — will ban imports of Russian gold.

The sanctions target 70 entities, including State Corporation Rostec, which the Treasury described as the the cornerstone of Russia’s defense, industrial, technology and manufacturing sectors, as well as 29 Russian individuals.

"Targeting Russia’s defense industry will degrade [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s capabilities and further impede his war against Ukraine, which has already been plagued by poor morale, broken supply chains, and logistical failures," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement announcing the actions, which came as G-7 leaders wrapped up their annual summit meeting, which was held in Germany this year.

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ELMAU, Germany — This year’s G-7 summit may have been held in the Bavarian Alps, but the results of the high-profile gathering of leading democracies looks a lot more like Swiss cheese — full of gaping holes.

President Joe Biden arrived in Germany for two days of refuge and luxury in the embrace of like-minded allies, leaving behind MAGA-world, a polarized Congress, and a radical Supreme Court undercutting his presidency. Autocrats weren’t invited; protesters were kept on the other side of the mountain.

Biden wasn’t alone in breathing a sigh of relief to be away from home: just one G-7 leader arrived with a net positive approval rating, Italy’s Mario Draghi.

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