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If Mr. Trump maintains his advantage in those four states, he will have a total of 268 electoral votes — only two short of the 270 needed to win the election.

All Mr. Trump would need to win is one of the three remaining battleground states: Michigan … … Pennsylvania … … or Wisconsin. If Mr. Trump were to carry all three of these states he would win decisively, with 312 electoral votes.

These states, which total 36 electoral votes, have been safely part of the Democratic Party base in recent years. Maine has voted for the Democratic nominee in the last eight elections, Minnesota every time since 1972, New Hampshire for the last five elections, New Mexico in every election except one since 1988, and Virginia in the last four elections. (Mr. Biden will also need to defend Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, which he won by more than six points in 2020, in order to win the election.)

If Mr. Biden were to lose these states and the seven battlegrounds, Mr. Trump would win with 347 electoral votes — the largest presidential electoral victory since 2008. Assuming that Mr. Biden could hold these five states only brings his total back up to 226 electoral votes — 44 short of the 270 he needs to get re-elected. Unless the basic contours of the race change and some of the Sun Belt battleground states become more competitive (which is unlikely), Mr. Biden’s only viable path for winning is to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

July 13, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET

In a clear night sky above the shores of Odesa, the faint glow from missiles streaks over the Black Sea.

For much of the war, it was one-way traffic, with Russia using the occupied Crimean Peninsula first as a launchpad for its full-scale invasion and then as a staging ground for routine aerial bombardments.

Ukraine, now armed with American-made precision missiles, is for the first time capable of reaching every corner of Crimea — and the missiles are increasingly flying in both directions.

It is a new strategic push as Kyiv seeks to raise the cost for Russian occupation forces that have long used the peninsula as a base of operations just off Ukraine’s southern coast.

While it is unlikely to have much effect on the front line, Ukraine’s campaign with the long-range version of the Army Tactical Missile Systems, known as ATACMS, appears meant to force the Kremlin to make difficult choices about where to deploy some of its most valuable air defenses to protect critical military infrastructure.

At the NATO summit in Washington this past week, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the Crimean campaign would have limited effect as long as Moscow can move its bombers to the safety of air bases deep in Russia. He pressed the Biden administration to lift restrictions so Kyiv can extend its strikes deep into Russia.

Since the arrival of the ATACMS this spring, the Ukrainian military has claimed to have destroyed or damaged at least 15 Russian long-range air defense systems in Crimea. Among those are the powerful S-300 and S-400 batteries, Moscow’s version of the American Patriot air defense system.

Over the past three months, commercial satellite imagery examined by military analysts has confirmed damage to Russian radar installations, electronic warfare assets, logistics routes and air fields.

“It is definitely fair to say the Ukrainians have had pretty impressive successes over the past couple of months,” said Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for air power and technology at the Royal United Services Institute in London who has studied the satellite imagery.

It is impossible to confirm every Ukrainian claim, and throughout the war, Mr. Bronk said, new high-tech weapons have generally become less effective as the Russians adapt and Ukrainian stockpiles dwindle.

The strikes on Crimea are also likely to have a minimal effect on the fighting on the front, especially in eastern Ukraine, where the heaviest battles are taking place and where Russian forces continue to gain ground.

The attacks on the peninsula that use Western weapons have drawn Russia’s ire, prompting it to warn the United States of the “consequences” it will face for providing advanced weapons to Kyiv.

Related in part to these warnings, several American bases in Europe were recently put on a heightened state of alert, according to two U.S. military officials and one senior Western intelligence official. The bases, including the U.S. Army garrison in Stuttgart, Germany, where the headquarters of the U.S. European Command are, were apparently concerned about potential Russian sabotage.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Crimea holds deep political, symbolic and military value for President Vladimir V. Putin, who has called it Russia’s “holy land,” placing it at the center of his false narrative that Ukraine is part of Russia.

Since illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, Moscow has heavily invested in expanding its military footprint. From Sevastopol in the west to Kerch in the east, military installations have been spotted dotting both coastal areas and hidden within mountainous enclaves. Used to create an image of Russia as a great power, the Kremlin has also poured resources into making it a tourist destination.

Crimea helps to sustain the Russian occupation in southern Ukraine and is packed with land-based missile systems used to target Ukrainian cities and towns. Penetrating Russia’s robust air defenses remains challenging, but this summer, Ukraine was able to launch the same kind of assaults aimed at overwhelming and confusing the air defenses that it has been defending against for years.

In a multipronged attack starting on May 29, Ukraine used domestically produced air and sea drones, Western cruise missiles and ATACMS to overwhelm advanced Russian air defenses, the Ukrainian military and intelligence services said.

The attack damaged two ferries that played a critical roll in the military supply chain between Russia and Crimea, a result confirmed by satellite imagery reviewed by military analysts, British military intelligence, Ukrainian officials and, in part, by local Russian officials.

“The Ukrainian strike on the ferry crossings and a subsequent attack on a nearby fuel depot, highlights again the vulnerability of the Strait to Ukrainian interdiction, despite Russia’s significant investment in security and air defense,” the British military intelligence agency said in a statement a week after the assault.

A senior U.S. official who closely tracks the war said Ukraine was using the American-supplied long-range missiles “very effectively.”

The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations, said Ukraine had enough ATACMS to keep up the Crimea campaign, adding that munitions were being replenished on a continuous basis.

While not providing exact numbers, the official said the United States was sending “scores” of missiles, but not “hundreds.”

Continued attacks on Russian air defenses could force Moscow to move some warplanes from Crimea “or risk losing more aircraft,” the British military intelligence agency reported.

Ukraine is pressing the Biden administration to lift restrictions so it can extend the campaign to target air bases deep inside Russia, limiting the number of places Russian bombers can find sanctuary.

“Imagine how much we can achieve when all limitations are lifted,” Mr. Zelensky said in a speech this past week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Washington.

Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army Europe who has long advocated giving Ukraine long-range strike abilities, said he was impressed with the Ukrainian targeting methodology since the arrival of the ATACMS.

“They are doing what we would be doing,” he said. “Going after air defenses to set the groundwork for whatever is coming next.”

F-16 fighter jets provided by the West are expected to start flying in the skies above Ukraine in limited numbers this summer, but their effectiveness would be limited if Russia’s air defenses remained intact.

“If you want your drones or F-16s or any other asset to come in and hit big targets, you need to clear the way,” Mr. Hodges said.

Russia has responded to the uptick in attacks on Crimea by bringing in air defense systems from Kaliningrad and other parts of the country, according to Ukrainian and Western officials.

The Kremlin also dispatched its S-500 Prometheus air defense system to the battlefield for the first time, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, told reporters last month.

Janes, a defense intelligence company in London, said that its analysts visually confirmed the deployment of at least the radar component of the S-500 to Crimea.

Russia still has robust air defenses, as was evident during a recent attack that appeared to be aimed at the Belbek air base just north of Sevastopol. Debris from an intercepted Ukrainian missile fell on a nearby beach, killing five civilians and injuring dozens more, according to Russian officials.

Russia immediately blamed the United States for the deaths, and the Kremlin summoned the American ambassador in Moscow. The Russian Defense Ministry warned that the strikes in Crimea were raising the “risk of direct confrontation between the alliance and the Russian Federation.”

But Ukraine shows no sign of slowing its campaign in Crimea, and residents there who were reached by secure messaging apps said the usual summer crowds of tourists were noticeably thinner.

While people still go to the beaches, one person said, some now wear badges with their name, home address and contacts for their next of kin.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Anna Sikorska from Kyiv, Ukraine. Nataliia Novosolova and Anastasia Kuznietsova contributed research.

See more on: Russia-Ukraine War

The Justice Department said on Tuesday that it had moved to disrupt a covert Russian influence operation that used artificial intelligence to spread propaganda in the United States, Europe and Israel with the goal of undermining support for Ukraine and stoking internal political divisions.

Working with the governments of Canada and the Netherlands, as well as officials at Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, the department said it seized two internet domains in the United States and took down 968 inauthentic accounts that the Russian government created after its attack on Ukraine began in 2022.

In affidavits released with the announcement, officials with the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon’s Cyber National Mission Force linked the effort to Russia’s Federal Security Service and RT, the state television network that has channels in English and several other languages.

The disclosure of such a large, global network of bots confirmed widespread warnings that the popularization of rapidly developing A.I. tools would make it easier to produce and spread dubious content. With A.I., information campaigns can be created in a matter of minutes — the kind of work that in the months before the 2016 presidential election, for example, required an army of office workers.

The Russian network used an A.I.-enhanced software package to create scores of fictitious user profiles on X. It did so by registering the users with email accounts on two internet domains, mlrtr.com and otanmail.com. (OTAN, perhaps coincidentally, is the French acronym for the NATO alliance.) The software could then generate posts for the accounts — and even repost, like and comment on the posts of other bots in the network.

Both domains were based in the United States but controlled by Russian administrators, who used the accounts to promote propaganda produced by the RT television network. In a statement, the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, called it “a generative AI-enhanced social media bot farm.”

As with other legal action against Russians, the allegations are unlikely to lead to arrests, but officials made it clear that they hoped that exposing propaganda operations could help to disrupt them and blunt their impact.

The United States “will not tolerate Russian government actors and their agents deploying A.I. to sow disinformation and fuel division among Americans,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.

The seizures came ahead of November’s presidential election, which, officials have warned, is already a target of influence operations from Russia and other nations, including Iran.

In a separate briefing on Tuesday, officials with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that Russia’s efforts to sway public opinion in the United States about American support for Ukraine, using the bots, paralleled its ongoing efforts to influence the election in November.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence assessments, said Russia was continuing its strategy from 2016 and 2020. Then, it favored the election of President Donald J. Trump.

Although the Russia operation detailed in the affidavits focused on X, formerly Twitter, officials in the United States, Canada and the Netherlands issued an advisory calling on other social media companies to identify fictitious accounts on their platforms “to reduce Russian malign foreign influence activity.”

X’s cooperation showed that the company is willing to work with federal authorities despite Mr. Musk’s avowals to create a public square free of interference from the authorities.

The Justice Department said that X “voluntarily suspended the remaining bot accounts identified in the court documents for terms of service violations.” The company declined to comment on its role in disrupting the Russian network.

The Justice Department said that the use of the domains violated the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the law the Biden administration invoked to impose punitive economic penalties against Russia when its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. The department also said payments for the domains violated federal money laundering laws.

The campaign created fake users on X that seemed genuine, like Ricardo Abbott, supposedly a resident of Minneapolis who created an account in June 2023. One video posted by that account showed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claiming that parts of Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania were “gifts” granted to those countries by the Soviet Union during World War II.

Another bot used the name Sue Williamson, and claimed to be a resident of Gresham, presumably the city outside Portland, Ore. Her account bio included an obscenity and the phrase, “Think for yourself.”

The accounts focused on several countries besides the United States, including Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Ukraine and Israel, the officials said.

RT, which the State Department describes as a critical player in the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda apparatus, has been blocked in the European Union, Canada and other countries, while social media companies have also labeled or otherwise restricted its spread on their platforms.

Even so, it has repeatedly sought new ways to sidestep those restrictions and reach global audiences. A report last month found that thousands of the network’s articles had spread online using fake websites with names, like Man Stuff News, intended to disguise the origin of the content.

The Justice Department’s announcements charged that the network’s deputy editor in chief worked with an officer of the Russian Federal Security Service to organize the operation. It did not name the editor, but the network’s website identifies the person holding that position as Anna Belkina.

RT’s press office, asked to respond to the accusations, appeared to mock them. “Farming is a beloved pastime for millions of Russians,” it replied in an email, without elaborating.

A senior NATO official said that coordinated government responses to Russian information operations — the United States, Canada and the Netherlands are all members of the alliance — were intended to show Mr. Putin “that we know what’s happening.”

Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at German Marshall Fund, a research organization that reported in May on the fake websites spreading RT content, said that the Russians remain persistent.

“While today’s announcement is obviously good news and shows that the government and private sector are still cooperating to combat foreign malign influence,” he said, “we should look at this in much the same way that we look at drug seizures at the U.S. border — for every influence campaign they catch, there are likely many, many more that have evaded detection.”

Lara Jakes and Kate Conger contributed reporting

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. and Allies Take Aim At Russian Disinformation. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: 2024 Elections, Russia-Ukraine War

The F.B.I. cut ties to at least a handful of informants and issued warnings about dozens of others after an internal review prompted by concerns that they were linked to Russian disinformation, current and former U.S. officials said.

The review was carried out in 2020 and 2021 by a small group within the bureau’s counterintelligence division, with the findings then passed along to field offices, which handle informants.

It led to the severing of sources — some of whom had offered information about Russia-aligned oligarchs, political leaders and other influential figures — at a moment when the bureau was asking agents to produce more information from and about those same networks. The review was conducted during and after the 2020 election, when concerns about Russian meddling were running high, and at a time when the United States was closely monitoring whether Russia would invade Ukraine.

The episode highlighted a tricky balance: The more access informants have to valuable intelligence, the higher the risk that they could knowingly or unknowingly be used to channel disinformation. This is particularly true with regard to post-Soviet countries, where shifting alliances among oligarchs, politicians and intelligence services have far-reaching consequences that can be difficult for Western governments to discern.

Even in an age of high-tech intelligence gathering and surveillance, human sources continue to play an important role in law enforcement and national security, giving agents the chance to gather insights and perspective that cannot always be gleaned from communications intercepts, for example.

The New York Times has independently confirmed, but is not disclosing, the identities of several of the F.B.I. informants who provided information about Russia and Ukraine and who were cut off around the time of the review by the bureau’s counterintelligence division, including one informant that predated the review.

Johnathan C. Buma, an F.B.I. agent who oversaw at least four of the informants who were dropped, suggested in a written statement provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that law enforcement should embrace the murkiness that comes with operating in the shadows.

“Typical disinformation operations are based on partial truths, and the only way to determine the veracity of the allegations is to conduct an independent investigation to attempt corroboration,” Mr. Buma wrote in explaining his opposition to the terminations.

His statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is led by Democrats, as well as a statement Mr. Buma submitted earlier to a special subcommittee of the Republican-controlled House, came after he filed a whistle-blower complaint accusing the F.B.I. of suppressing intelligence from his sources and retaliating against him.

The F.B.I. is investigating Mr. Buma’s dealings with an informant he worked with after the bureau cut off those identified in the counterintelligence review, a person familiar with the matter said.

The F.B.I. had been aware of Russian disinformation efforts for years, and eventually became concerned that the campaign extended to its own informants.

In particular, the F.B.I. watched as informants across the bureau’s different divisions began peddling new information that was politically explosive. It included reports regarding President Biden’s family and former President Donald J. Trump, as well as other inflammatory topics, according to former and current U.S. officials and an ex-informant for the counterintelligence division.

The types of concerns that prompted the review spilled into public view in February, when prosecutors indicted a longtime informant on Russia and Ukraine matters, Alexander Smirnov, for lying to the F.B.I.

Prosecutors accused him of fabricating claims about bribes paid to the Bidens by a Ukrainian energy company whose board included the president’s son, Hunter Biden. Prosecutors said Mr. Smirnov had passed along information about Hunter Biden — though they did not provide specifics — from Russian intelligence.

Mr. Smirnov was flagged as part of the F.B.I. review but he was not shut down, because information he was providing was being used in other investigations, the former and current U.S. officials said.

Around the time of the review, the F.B.I. circulated internal memos to agents hinting at competing imperatives. On the one hand, agents were instructed to gather more intelligence from informants about Russian efforts to meddle in U.S. politics, and to retaliate against the United States for its support of Ukraine.

On the other, they were urged to be on the lookout for disinformation, misinformation or influence operations from foreign governments that took aim at American politics, according to the memos, which were obtained by The Times.

The memos, each of which was labeled “collection priorities message,” listed the identification numbers and handling agents of informants who could be of assistance on such matters. The memos do not mention the terminations, or any concerns about specific informants.

A former official said that dozens of F.B.I. agents in field offices were warned to handle their informants, known as confidential human sources, with extra care because the Russians might have been aware of their contact with the United States. Under bureau policy, the decision to end relationships with informants rests with the F.B.I. field offices and not headquarters.

A U.S. official described this effort as an “awareness campaign” inside the F.B.I.

The bureau’s sources are often encouraged to maintain associations with criminal figures or foreign intelligence services. The idea is for them to report back on those associates; in the process, though, they can become conduits used by those associates to inject false information — intentionally or unknowingly — into the realms of U.S. law enforcement or intelligence.

Some terminations in early 2022 were classified as precautionary and not for cause, according to Mr. Buma’s statement and one of his former informants. That suggests there was no specific evidence that those informants had willfully tried to channel Russian disinformation into federal law enforcement, but rather that there was concern that they might have done so unwittingly, or merely been associated with people believed to be pushing disinformation, or politically motivated information.

Information provided by one of Mr. Buma’s terminated informants, an American businessman with deep connections overseas, was used by the special counsel investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to Mr. Buma’s statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Other information from the businessman was used to revoke the U.S. visa of a Ukrainian-Russian oligarch and to support the decision to impose sanctions on a Ukrainian oligarch who had been a key backer of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, according to Mr. Buma’s statement. And it was used to identify two corrupt federal law enforcement agents.

Among the associations that appear to have raised red flags within the F.B.I. was the businessman’s recruitment of two Ukrainians who would themselves become F.B.I. informants. One of the Ukrainians was a former K.G.B. agent who had become a Ukrainian intelligence operative, who developed high-level Ukrainian government contacts through his leadership of a foundation dedicated to tracking kleptocracy, according to Mr. Buma’s statement. It identified the other as a researcher for the foundation who had a background in economics.

In January 2019, according to interviews and Mr. Buma’s statement, the two Ukrainians traveled to the Los Angeles area for meetings during which they provided information to representatives from the F.B.I. and other agencies about oligarchs, money laundering and Ukrainian and American political figures.

Among their claims was one that Hunter Biden had failed to disclose lobbying he did for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and had failed to pay taxes on income from the company. Mr. Biden was not charged with lobbying violations. He was charged last year with failure to file tax returns covering millions of dollars in income from Burisma and other foreign businesses. It is not clear whether information from the two Ukrainian informants played any role in the investigation.

The F.B.I. first pressed to cut off the businessman after he and the two Ukrainians attended a conservative gala in May 2019. At the event, the Ukrainians presented a thumb drive containing allegations about Mr. Biden and other Democrats to an aide traveling with Mike Pompeo, then the secretary of state, according to internal F.B.I. reports and an article published in Business Insider.

Mr. Buma successfully resisted efforts to terminate the American businessman.

Mr. Buma argued that the informant was granting the F.B.I. a critical view into a murky world that was increasingly important to U.S. national security as Russia built up its efforts to influence American politics and exert control over Ukraine, according to interviews and the statement Mr. Buma provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Buma had been trained by the bureau to speak Russian. Part of his job was identifying and recruiting informants with access to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, politicians and their networks.

The American businessman became “one of the F.B.I.’s top C.H.S.s whose reporting had been extensively corroborated through predicated investigations, with numerous well-documented high-impact successes related to countering foreign influence and public corruption on both sides of the political spectrum,” Mr. Buma wrote in his statement to the Senate, referring to confidential human sources.

Yet, in the weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the bureau again expressed concerns about the businessman and other sources connected to him.

In a meeting in February 2022, an official with the bureau’s Foreign Influence Task Force told Mr. Buma that he was “not the only field agent whom they were asking to close their sources related to Russia/Ukraine matters just as the war erupted,” Mr. Buma wrote in his statement to the Senate. “When I questioned the wisdom of their request, the supervising analyst claimed their recommendation relied on highly classified information from the National Security Agency.”

The informants were closed out, as were others linked to the businessman, including, Mr. Buma recalled in his statement, “many other productive sources in that category who took years for me to develop.”

Mr. Buma suggested in his statement that the closures were an effort to shut down investigations that might implicate Trump allies, including Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Buma had collected information from the businessman about Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to damage the Bidens by highlighting their work in Ukraine.

The F.B.I. declined to comment on Mr. Buma’s claims.

Mr. Buma privately discussed his allegations last summer with Republican staff members for the House subcommittee and with aides to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who chairs the oversight subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There is no evidence that either congressional committee is investigating his claims. A spokesman for the House subcommittee declined to comment, while representatives for the Senate Judiciary Committee and Mr. Whitehouse did not respond.

Months later, Mr. Buma’s home was searched for classified information by the F.B.I. Mr. Buma has been suspended from the bureau, but he has not been criminally charged.

Scott Horton, a lawyer for Mr. Buma, cast the investigation as “revenge” against his client for having suggested that the F.B.I.’s handling of confidential sources was affected by political bias against the Bidens and in favor of Mr. Trump’s allies.

Mr. Horton said he had met with Hunter Biden’s lawyers to discuss how Mr. Buma’s story might be of assistance. Another lawyer for Mr. Buma, Mark Geragos, is also representing Mr. Biden.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: F.B.I. Shed Informants Tied to Russian Schemes. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: U.S. Politics

The phenomenon of “misnaming,” or calling someone by the wrong name, is more common than we think. Pexels, Public Domain

President Biden at a news conference in Washington on Thursday night.Credit…Eric Lee/The New York Times

President Biden on Thursday answered questions from reporters about foreign policy, whether he is up to defeating former President Donald J. Trump and why he is resisting calls from Democrats to end his candidacy, as he sought to recover from a crisis of confidence that has engulfed his campaign.

With a growing number of Democratic lawmakers, donors and elected officials urging Mr. Biden to drop out of the race after a disastrous debate performance last month, the closing news conference of a NATO summit in Washington became a high-stakes chance for the president to quiet concerns about his candidacy. The results were mixed.

Mr. Biden stumbled early but remained defiant in the face of questions about his fitness to continue his campaign. He struggled to articulate a cohesive case for his candidacy, even as he gave a forceful defense of his record and showed a strong command over foreign policy.

Here are five takeaways:

Mr. Biden vowed to stay in the presidential race. “I’m determined on running,” Mr. Biden said. He dismissed polling showing him losing to Mr. Trump and insisted, “I think I’m the best qualified person to do the job.” But he also acknowledged that the schedule of the presidency had become challenging. “I just got to, just, pace myself a little more,” Mr. Biden said.

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Before the debate, he said, his schedule was “full-bore” and he made the “stupid mistake” of too much travel and too many late nights before the debate. Mr. Biden also blamed his staff for the packed days. “I love my staff,” Mr. Biden said. “But they add things. They add things all the time at the very end.”

Mr. Biden’s response to the first question contained the kind of fumble that has caused Democrats anxiety. Asked about the ability of Vice President Kamala Harris to defeat Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden said that he “wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president did I think she was not qualified to be president.”

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He also slipped while answering a question about military assistance to Ukraine, saying he follows the advice of his “commander in chief” — which is the president — before correcting himself and mentioning his senior military commanders. For the most part, though, he avoided the kinds of prolonged, painful moments he experienced during the debate in which he was unable to complete a thought, even as he meandered at times in his answers.

In the face of questions over his mental acuity, Mr. Biden showed he still had a strong grasp on substance when it came to global affairs. He gave long, detailed answers on various foreign policy matters, including when he said he was prepared to interrupt the relationship between China and Russia. “We have to make sure that Xi understands that there’s a price to pay,” Mr. Biden said, referring to President Xi Jinping of China.

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He reiterated his longstanding position that Ukraine should not be allowed to use American weapons to strike deep into Russia, including Moscow and the Kremlin. And he detailed his efforts to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, noting that Israel “occasionally” was “less than cooperative.” He also made the case for the global stakes of the election, saying fellow world leaders had told him that “you’ve got to win” because Mr. Trump would be a disaster for their countries.

Mr. Biden rambled while making the case for his candidacy, launching long-winded recitations of what he has accomplished as president and maintaining that he should have the chance to continue, but never landing on a concise message for why he is the best person to do so.

“I’m determined on running,” he said. “But I think it’s important that I real — I allay fears. I’ve seen — let them see me out there, let me see them out, you know — for the longest time, it was, you know, ‘Biden’s not prepared to sit with us unscripted; Biden is not prepared to’ — and anyway.”

He then began ticking through statistics about the reach of his re-election campaign, and suggested that all the work would be for nothing if he left the race, saying, “It’s awful hard to replace in the near term.” He then veered into talking about his record in the Senate, adding, “Anyway, I’m going to be going around making the case of the things that I think we have to finish and how we can’t afford to lose what we’ve done.”

He said polls showed he was the strongest candidate to beat Mr. Trump, but also conceded for the first time that other Democrats could also do so. “I believe I’m the best qualified to govern and I think I’m the best qualified to win, but there are other people who could beat Trump, too,” he said. “But it’s awful to start from scratch.”

While he vowed to stay in the race, Mr. Biden also on multiple occasions defended the credentials of his vice president. He commended her work defending abortion rights and “her ability to handle almost any issue on the board.” But he also made clear that any polling showing Ms. Harris faring better in a matchup against Mr. Trump would not compel him to step down. “Unless they came back and said there’s no way you can win,” Mr. Biden said. “No one’s saying that.”

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