Volodymyr Yelchenko, Ukraine’s permanent representative at the United Nations, has been approved as the country’s new ambassador to the United States, according to Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko.
In an interview with the Unian news agency published on Dec. 16, the minister said Yelchenko had already been approved by Washington to take charge of the Ukrainian diplomatic mission.
“We have already received an agreement,” Prystaiko said, adding that Yelchenko’s candidacy was determined as far back as two months ago.
Prystaiko’s comments came just days after the New York Times reported that Yelchenko’s appointment might have been delayed due to allies of U.S. President Donald J. Trump lobbying for the nomination of Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat closely aligned with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.
Telizhenko has claimed that the Ukrainian diplomatic mission to Washington sought to undermine the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election. That unproven allegation, originally published in a January 2017 article on the Politico news site, has become central to a conspiracy theory pushed by pro-Trump media that it was Ukraine — and not Russia — that interfered in the election.
In recent months, Trump’s political allies have embraced Telizhenko, who traveled with Giuliani to Kyiv in early December to meet with current and former Ukrainian officials who claim to have dirt on Trump’s opponents.
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Nonetheless, it is not clear if Ukraine’s Presidential Office or Ministry of Foreign Affairs ever actually considered nominating Telizhenko, who briefly served as a low-ranking diplomat at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington D.C. in 2016.
The position of Ukraine’s top envoy to the United States has remained vacant since July 19, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed the previous ambassador, Valeriy Chaliy.
Yelchenko, 60, has served as Ukraine’s envoy to the UN since 2015. He was initially reported to be in the running for the position of ambassador to Washington in mid-October.
