Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to meet with his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump during the United Nations General Assembly session in New York on Sept. 23-26.
But the first-ever meeting of the two leaders, much anticipated in Ukraine, will be marred by the recent U.S. political scandal, provoked by a whistleblower’s complaint that Trump had allegedly pressured Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden, the son of political rival and former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, during a phone conversation on July 25.
Trump and his lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and ex-federal prosecutor, have also accused the former vice president of attempting to stop a Ukrainian criminal investigation by ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin into corruption involving Burisma, the energy company on which Hunter Biden joined in April 2014 as a member of the board of directors, with compensation reportedly at more than $50,000 monthly.
Read also: Meet the Florida duo helping Giuliani investigate for Trump in Ukraine
“The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, want to stay as far away as possible from the Joe Biden demand that the Ukrainian Government fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son, or they won’t get a very large amount of U.S. money, so they fabricate a story about me and a perfectly fine and routine conversation I had with the new President of the Ukraine,” Trump tweeted.
On Sept. 22, however, he suggested that he brought up the Biden issue to Zelensky. “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, with largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place and largely the fact that we don’t want our people like Vice President Biden and his son creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine,” Trump said, but defended his conversation with the Ukrainian leader as “perfect” and “there was no quid pro quo.”
Zelensky hasn’t commented on the July 25 phone conversation yet with Trump beyond a readout that the President’s Office put out summarizing the talk. In it, the President’s Office wrote: “Donald Trump is convinced that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve image of Ukraine, complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA.”
Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine’s foreign affairs minister, who in July was Zelensky’s adviser on the foreign issues, in an interview with Hromadske news outlet said he knew about the conversation and denied that Trump pressured Zelensky during the phone call.
“I know what the conversation was about and I do not think there was any pressure” from Trump, Prystaiko was quoted as saying. “There was a conversation, different conversation, leaders have the right to discuss any existing issues. This was a long and friendly conversation that touched on a lot of issues, sometimes requiring serious answers.”
Here’s what we know about what happened and how it may affect Ukraine.
Whistleblower
On Aug. 12, a whistleblower from U.S. government filed a complaint to Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general, regarding Trump’s phone call with a foreign leader.
Atkinson found the complaint credible and determined it as a matter of “urgent concern.” In this case, the U.S. law required notification of congressional oversight committees.
But Joseph Maguire, the acting director of the U.S. national intelligence, refused to share it with Congress.
Nevertheless, the scandal went public when the U.S. media reported on Sept. 19-20 more details of the whistleblower’s report and revealed it was related to Ukraine.
On Sept. 21, Biden during his campaign speech in Iowa accused Trump of the “overwhelming abuse of power” and urged the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate him.
Members of the U.S. House investigating Trump want the entire transcript of the phone call disclosed. Several members of Congress from the Democratic Party have renewed calls for impeaching Trump, but the initiative doesn’t have enough votes yet. Trump called the new scandal around him a “witch hunt.”
Conversation between Zelensky and Trump
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 19 that Trump allegedly asked Zelensky “about eight times” to cooperate with Giuliani on an investigation against Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son.
The firm that Hunter Biden served as a board member, Burisma, is an a Ukrainian energy company owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, former Ukraine’s ecology minister, who fled Ukraine in 2014 escaping the anti-corruption probe against him.
Burisma case
The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine investigated Burisma, the company that employed Hunter Biden, for money laundering and illicit enrichment. It closed the case in November 2016, under Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, Shokin’s successor, reporting that it didn’t find any crime, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.
Trump’s lawyer Giuliani, in an interview with CNN on Sept. 20, admitted that he had asked a Ukrainian official to investigate Biden’s alleged pressure on Ukraine’s authorities to sack Shokin in 2016. Giuliani claimed Biden’s efforts were linked to Shokin’s investigation of Burisma.
However, by the time that Biden intervened, anti-corruption activists in Ukraine led the campaign against Shokin for months, accusing him of sabotage in the investigation of the corruption cases, including the Burisma case involving Zlochevsky. In fact, as early as 2015, the U.S. had wanted Shokin removed and investigated, partly because of obstruction of the Burisma case.
Geoffrey R. Pyatt, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine at the time, took a strong stance on the need to fire Shokin, with prosecutors’ sabotage of the Zlochevsky case factoring high in the reasoning of U.S. policy. In a landmark speech against Ukraine’s corrupt prosecutors at the Odesa Financial Forum on Sept. 24, 2015, Pyatt cited the case:
“For example, in the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the U.K. authorities had seized $23 million in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian people. Officials at the PGO’s office were asked by the U.K to send documents supporting the seizure. Instead, they sent letters to Zlochevsky’s attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result, the money was freed by the U.K. court and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus. The misconduct by the PGO officials who wrote those letters should be investigated, and those responsible for subverting the case by authorizing those letters should – at a minimum – be summarily terminated.”
Biden has been public about his involvement in trying to get Shokin fired, which had become the U.S. position. In a book he wrote after leaving office called “Promise Me, Dad.” And, on Jan. 23, 2018, when speaking at an event in Washington D.C. hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden talked about his role in Shokin’s dismissal. He claimed that back in 2016 he had pressured then-President Petro Poroshenko and then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk to sack Shokin, whom he saw as corrupt. Biden, who took the lead in carrying out America’s Ukraine policy under ex-U.S. President Barack Obama, threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee if Poroshenko kept Shokin.
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden said.
Consequences for Ukraine
In early August, the White House froze a package of military aid to Ukraine worth $250 million, which was planned to be used to improve Ukraine’s defense against Russia in a war that has already cost about 13,000 lives.
Trump’s critics considered this decision to be a part of the pressure on Zelensky to cooperate against Trump’s rival in the presidential elections in 2020. In early September, however, Trump’s administration lifted the hold of this money.
In February, Valeriy Chaly, then Ukraine’s ambassador in the U.S., said the total American aid to Ukraine in 2019 would reach almost $700 million.
But with the political battles raging in the U.S., Ukraine needs to walk a political tightrope to keep the bipartisan support it has enjoyed from its main strategic partner. It will be especially dangerous ahead of the tough peace talks Zelensky is expected to have soon with Russian President Vladimir Putin with the mediation of leaders of France and Germany in a so-called Normandy Format.
Kostiantyn Yeliseyev, a Ukrainian diplomat who advised Poroshenko on foreign policy issues in 2015-2019, said the upcoming meeting of Zelensky and Trump would likely involve talks about Biden.
“Knowing how straightforward Trump is, I predict that he may make an ultimatum, linking the future aid from Washington with a notorious Burisma case,” Yeliseyev wrote in his column on Ukrainska Pravda on Sept. 21.
