On May 9, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced he was coming to Kyiv.
U. S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer said he planned to meet with President-elect Volodymyr Zelenskiy to support two investigations beneficial to Trump: one into alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election against Trump, and another into whether ex-Vice President Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general in 2016 to protect his son’s business interests.
Then, just a day later, Giuliani announced he wasn’t coming, blaming “enemies of the president, in some cases enemies of the United States.”
Good riddance. The only “enemy of the United States” in this case is Giuliani, whose provocative trip would have been politically destabilizing for Ukraine, an American ally.
Both of Giuliani’s “investigations” are fundamentally flawed narratives pushed by Trump’s circle and, apparently, even Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, to advance their own interests.
The “Ukraine interference” narrative focuses on the “black ledger” of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, which revealed illegal payments to former Trump campaign chair and convicted financial criminal Paul Manafort. Giuliani notes that a court ruled it had been illegally leaked.
Even if we accept that ruling (which is being appealed), so-called “Ukrainian interference” bears few similarities to the very real Russian interference in the U.S. election. Unlike Moscow, Ukraine neither hacked the emails of government or political institutions, nor impersonated Americans online in a move to destabilize the vote. Rather, two officials simply released documents attesting to Manafort’s corruption.
These documents pertain to corruption in Ukraine. Thus, their release — legal or not — is not election interference.
The Biden narrative is too complicated to rehash here. But suffice it to say, it has been refuted by countless experts and anti-corruption activists. In 2016, Biden indeed pressured Ukraine to fire Viktor Shokin, its ineffective, weak prosecutor general. In doing so, he called for a decision supported both by Ukrainian reformers and Kyiv’s Western partners. No conspiracy here.
Giuliani should stay away from politics and stick to his lucrative consulting work for the city of Kharkiv. Given recent scandals surrounding a high-profile car crash there, they could use the help.
