Ukrainegate Isn’t the First Scandal Involving Trump and Kyiv

This week, U.S. President Donald Trump has been embroiled in a scandal that has restarted Democratic efforts in the House of Representatives to impeach him. At issue is a whistleblower complaint, released Thursday, that raised concerns about a phone call in which Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the son of former U.S. Vice President and presidential hopeful Joe Biden. The White House released a summary of the call on Wednesday after previous efforts, the whistleblower alleged, to bury it.

As the story unfolds, we’ve collected our top reads on the tumultuous U.S.-Ukrainian relationship during the Trump years.

When it comes to Ukraine, Trump’s presidency got off to a rocky start. As the writer Paul McLeary reported in February 2017, “The Trump administration is facing its first major test on the international stage as volleys of Russian artillery and rockets continue to pound Ukrainian forces in the country’s contested east, reigniting the frozen conflict.” Given Trump’s noted affinity for Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, many in Kyiv feared that he would not do anything to protect the United States’ aspiring NATO ally.

That same month, it came to light that Andrey Artemenko, a right-wing member of the opposition in the Ukrainian parliament who was also allegedly close to Russia, had served as a back channel between Moscow and Trump’s associates, as Reid Standish, a special correspondent for Foreign Policy, explains. The episode was just one part of what was becoming a snowballing scandal over possible Russian interference during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As it was later discovered, in 2013, Paul Manafort, who would eventually serve as Trump’s campaign chairman, had likewise worked with former (and pro-Russian) Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych without reporting it under the Foreign Agents Registration Act—a fact that would later become yet another thorn in the Trump administration’s side, Foreign Policy’s Elias Groll reports.

The scene was set for the first meeting between Trump and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in June 2017. For Ukrainians, the optics of the meeting were key, write Standish and reporter Emily Tamkin. “Poroshenko was hosted by Pence; the two then had a ‘drop-in’ visit in the Oval Office to see Trump and H.R. McMaster, the national security advisor. The Ukrainian leader’s treatment is likely to be viewed back in Ukraine, and elsewhere in Europe, as a weather vane of sorts for the White House’s stance toward Kyiv and Russia’s military intervention there, which remains deadlocked since war began in 2014.”

Things started looking better for Ukraine by July, when, as Foreign Policy’s Robbie Gramer notes, Trump tapped a Russia hawk, former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker, to be the special representative to Ukraine. By all appearances, the Trump administration was getting serious about Ukraine, and “[t]hat seriousness,” Gramer argues, “could push all sides into honoring the Minsk accords, an internationally monitored cease-fire plan hastily brokered in 2015 as the conflict flared up.”

Also indicating a change in tone: By late 2017, a deal to send weapons to Ukraine—something Kyiv had long wanted—was on Trump’s desk awaiting his signature. “If the United States were to finally send arms to Ukraine,” Tamkin, Gramer, and reporter Dan De Luce explain, “it would mark a significant shift in U.S. policy—and a dramatic departure from Trump’s campaign rhetoric.” After all, “[a]head of the Republican National Convention in July 2016, the Trump team worked to make sure the platform would not include a call to arm Ukraine.”

Around the same time, UkrOboronProm, a government-run group of Ukrainian defense enterprises, was in Washington hawking its own wares. According to reporting by Tamkin, the reason was simple: “Until 2014, over 50 percent of Ukraine’s military equipment was supplied by Russia. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then the war with Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine have removed Russia from the picture. And so, in 2015, Ukraine began mass production of new weapons—and looked to replace Russia by working with, among others, U.S. partners.”

Eventually, Trump did approve sending some weapons to Ukraine. But U.S.-Ukrainian relations were far from settled. In late 2017, UkrOboronProm was hit with corruption investigations. As the journalist Askold Krushelnycky writes, “Ukraine’s embattled anti-corruption commission has been investigating wrongdoing in the state-run defense production enterprise, a consortium of around 130 companies with close ties to the country’s president, according to documents and interviews.”

Meanwhile, even if the United States was prepared to help Ukraine out militarily, the country needed far more, according to Michael Carpenter, the senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. “By providing Ukraine with defensive antitank weapons, the Trump administration has taken an important step towards helping the country defend itself against Russian aggression,” he explains. “The administration should now build on this enhanced relationship by upgrading and expanding the U.S. military’s training program in Ukraine and by using U.S. leverage to press Ukrainian leaders to follow through on anti-corruption reforms.”

The work of defending Ukraine from Russia, too, was far from over. Five years after Russia took Crimea—and months before the final round of Ukraine’s presidential elections in April 2019—Russia made another bold move. “Russia has seized unilateral control of the Kerch Strait, and the West has done nothing,” points out Stephen J. Hadley, who served as national security advisor under former President George W. Bush. The lack of response “may tempt Putin—who is already massing forces—to seize even more Ukrainian territory, attempt to subvert the Ukrainian presidential election, or both.”

With a new president, Zelensky, in power in Ukraine in May 2019, the United States also shook up its team. “In what top Democratic lawmakers called a ‘political hit job,’” report Gramer and Foreign Policy’s Amy Mackinnon, “U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch has been recalled by the Trump administration two months early following political attacks by right-wing media figures and a senior Ukrainian official.” Her dismissal, they write, “will leave the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv without a top diplomat at an important juncture in Ukraine, during the transition of newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky.”

Several months later, Trump’s dealings with Ukraine were in the news once more, as reports broke of a whistleblower complaint alleging that the president had sought to pressure Kyiv into investigating Biden during a phone call. (The administration had temporarily withheld military aid to Ukraine around the same time.) The memo summarizing the call was soon released, and it did show that Trump had asked Zelensky to investigate Biden and his son. Trump also appeared to suggest, write Mackinnon and Foreign Policy’s Lara Seligman, “that he could use as political leverage Ukraine’s request for additional advanced U.S. missiles that Kyiv sees as critical to its ability to deter a Russian ground invasion.”

In the hours since then, analysts have scrambled to assess the implications of the growing story. “[T]he nascent Ukraine scandal is very different from the allegations surrounding the Russian campaign of interference in the election that helped vault Trump into the Oval Office,” Groll argues. “The main reasons are these: The new allegations against Trump place him at the center of the story, involve his key lieutenants, focuses on abuse of power while in office, tie his apparently corrupt behavior to U.S. policy, and focuses on a set of actions that took place inside the United States.”

Meanwhile, Rutgers University professor Alexander J. Motyl finds that, if anything, news of the call could leave Ukraine better off: “If Zelensky acts wisely, he’ll exploit the enormous media coverage he and his country are getting to put across a positive message about Ukraine. The fact is that Ukraine is being unjustifiably identified as the source of the United States’ problems. It’s not, of course: The United States is. All Zelensky needs to do is to tell the truth about his country and its past achievements, current plans, and future prospects, and perhaps he can walk away with a better deal for his country—more interest, respect, and investment—than the one Trump is alleged to have offered.”