I saw John Bolton only once in my life.
It happened not in Ukraine, but in Munich, Germany, during a closed discussion at the annual security conference – a mere two months before he was appointed as national security adviser to U.S. President Donald J. Trump in 2018. Bolton spent more than an hour with us, a group of Ukrainian lawmakers, at Literaturhaus München. He looked like a man who is in no hurry. His views on the world resembled a theoretical study by an international scholar. No one then could have imagined that he would soon become one of the most influential figures in world politics with regular access to the Oval Office.
As a result of his 1.5 years of work there, Bolton has published a controversial memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.” In this book, we can learn a lot about how Ukrainian politics is seen in the ruling U.S. administration. And while we know many of the circumstances related to the impeachment of Trump through sworn testimony in court, Bolton’s book has shed light on several other events.
In his book, Bolton describes in detail his 2018 trip to Kyiv for Ukraine’s Independence Day celebration. The American guest took part in the parade on the main street of Kyiv, and held a meeting with the Ukrainian leadership.
Poroshenko asks for a favor
But after that something happened that is difficult to call traditional politics. Then-President Petro Poroshenko took Bolton to another room and asked the U.S. to back his re-election campaign and help him with a few more issues. Since Bolton has helped with those issues, it allowed him to refuse Poroshenko’s request for electoral assistance without seeming rude.
An outsider might wonder what kind of a weird request is that. The answer is simple. The entire Ukrainian politics is based on the fact that all the promising candidates for the post of Ukrainian president need to be reviewed by the U.S. Perhaps, the explanation for this lies in the unofficial doctrine of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, who laid the principle “without Ukraine, there can be no revival of the Soviet Union” at the heart of the American foreign policy. Brzezinski died in 2017, but his case lives on: Both American parties support Ukraine’s independence.
US ‘casting call’
All Ukraine’s presidents, starting with the second one, Leonid Kuchma, had to undergo a “mandatory casting call” in the U.S. Kuchma visited America before the election in 1994 at the invitation of Richard Nixon. They never had a chance to meet — the American president died on the eve of their meeting, and Kuchma instead had lunch with George Soros.
The next Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, was loved by the U.S. This was not only because of his liberal views but also because his wife was an American citizen., He visited Washington regularly. One day, during a conversation between Yushchenko and then-Vice President Al Gore, President Bill Clinton walked into his office and was introduced to the promising Ukrainian politician.
Yanukovych’s troubles
Viktor Yanukovych had a somewhat troubled past and had to use paid lobbyists to tune up his relationship with the American establishment. In 2002, this task was appointed to his adviser Eduard Prutnik, who hired a company Venable, LLP to boost Yanukovych’s image. After Yanukovych lost the 2004 presidential election, Paul Manafort took over this job. In the end, it cost him 7.5 years in prison and confiscation of his ill-gotten profits.
Poroshenko’s lobbyists
Poroshenko, who used the lobbying company BGR Group as a channel for informal communication with Washington, was also a frequent guest in the U.S. His services were paid for in a non-transparent way by the NGO called the National Council of Reforms, as the Kyiv Post had previously reported.
With the help of lobbyists, Poroshenko tried to win Trump’s approval. But Trump considered the Ukrainian government involved in trying to sabotage his presidential campaign in 2016. Poroshenko brought billions of dollars of Ukrainian budget to the sacrificial altar of his relationship with Trump – to buy coal from Pennsylvania, locomotives of General Electric, and nuclear fuel from Westinghouse.
Enter Zelensky
The American establishment had a chance to check out presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky only in Kyiv – he thought it would be irrational to leave Ukraine during the short election campaign in 2019. As Zelensky’s advisor at that time, I was lucky to witness a moment when the then-special envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, shook hands with the future president during a visit to the Zelensky’s team headquarters. Volker then cautiously tried to find out the views of the election’s frontrunner on many issues that concerned the U.S. – among those his relations with billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, the land law, the fight against corruption, the language issue, and cultural diversity in Ukraine. Volker reacted to every answer he heard with an approving nod.
From Bolton’s memoir, we can see that the American administration was as neutral as possible about the candidates during the last election in Ukraine. Although Poroshenko asked Bolton to impose U.S. sanctions against Kolomoisky during the same meeting on Ukraine’s Independence Day in 2018, he was politely rejected.
Investigating Kolomoisky
Bolton advised Poroshenko that evidence of Kolomoisky’s violation of the U.S. laws should be sent to the U.S. Department of Justice. In the end, without Poroshenko’s involvement, the FBI opened an investigation into Kolomoisky’s actions after a report by his former business partner Vadim Shulman, who accused him of laundering money in the U.S. by buying real estate in Cleveland.
As for Trump’s administration, Bolton’s memoirs never gave a clear answer about the nature of its relations with Ukraine. On one hand, the book is filled with Trump’s tirades against Ukraine, in which he accuses Ukraine of trying to prevent his election in 2016, mixing truth, fiction, and f-words. Trump is referring to the denunciation of his former chief of staff, Manafort, in 2016, for receiving illegal payments from Yanukovych. However, both the Justice Department and the jury confirmed that Manafort’s actions violated the law. Trump has no one to blame for that, except for Manafort himself.
In another instance, Trump calls Ukraine an obstacle to normalizing U.S. relations with Russia. But at the same time, he refuses to meet with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin because of the Russian aggression in the Kerch Strait, in which the Kremlin’s navy fired on Ukrainian military boats and captured 24 sailors.
Trump relies on Firtash lawyer
Trump’s policy is chaotic, and his assessment of Ukraine can be based both on official briefings by professional diplomats from the State Department, and on gossip and lies propagated by a supporter of conspiracy theorist Rudy Giuliani and lawyer Joe diGenova. According to Bolton, Trump personally called diGenova a source of his knowledge about Ukraine. This is shocking. For many Americans, the context is not clear, but Ukrainians know diGenova as someone working for the pro-Russian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who is facing bribery-related charges in the U.S. and is fighting extradition from Vienna.
Giuliani’s associate DiGenova is also involved in spreading the Russian narrative which seeks to shift responsibility for interference in the 2016 U.S. elections from Russia to Ukraine.
Pro-Russian Tymoshenko
Another revealing point in Bolton’s book concerns the U.S. State Department’s assessment of Yulia Tymoshenko as a pro-Russian politician. Describing his trip to Kyiv in 2018, Bolton recalls Tymoshenko’s request for a tête-à-tête meeting. He adds that the State Department has advised him to avoid such contact without witnesses because Tymoshenko is “too close” to Russia.
This ruins Tymoshenko’s longstanding efforts to build her reputation in the U.S. She has been using lobbyists’ help among the first in Ukraine’s politics – since 1997, when she traveled to the U.S. to be “reviewed.” She tried to build up her relations with Soros and Angela Merkel. However, Tymoshenko’s rhetoric now makes little difference from that of the pro-Russian politician and Putin’s friend Viktor Medvedchuk.
Tymoshenko, Medvedchuk alliance
Tymoshenko no longer names Ukrainian oligarchs as the cause of problems in the country, but blames “international financial speculators” for all problems and speaks about the loss of sovereignty. Moreover, Tymoshenko and Kolomoisky are appealing to the Constitutional Court regarding the banking law, which opened the way for Ukraine to receive the IMF money. And together with Medvedchuk, Tymoshenko turns down a law on the unbundling of Naftogaz which aimed to finalize the separation of the independent transmission system operator. This would be very convenient for Russia.
It was Naftogaz that at the end of 2019 signed a useful contract for Ukraine, which obliges Russia to pay for the transit of 65 billion cubic meters of gas this year, even if it doesn’t pump the contracted volumes through Ukraine, and for the next four years – for 40 billion cubic meters annually. With a decline in gas demand in Europe, Gazprom would be happy to break up this contract, but with Ukraine’s hands. And the decision of the Constitutional Court would create just the right conditions for that.
So in terms of Tymoshenko’s characterization, Bolton’s memoir turned out to be quite true.
Having told his story, Bolton showed an unpleasant backyard of both Ukrainian and American politics.
Sergii Leshchenko is a Kyiv Post columnist, investigative journalist, and former member of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.
