This week, Ambassador William Taylor, the United States’ charge d’affaires to Ukraine, testified in the U. S. House of Representative’s impeachment probe into President Donald Trump.
Amid a series of revelatory high-level testimonies, Taylor’s was still widely seen as the most damning. The veteran diplomat stated clearly that Trump had used military aid as leverage to force Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals.
The question now is: When did the Ukrainian government know they were being extorted?
Trump retorted that none of the witnesses “has provided testimony that the Ukrainians were aware that military aid was being withheld.”
“You can’t have a quid pro quo with no quo,” he tweeted on Oct. 23.
However, according to a New York Times report, Ukrainian officials knew about the aid freeze as early as August.
On Oct. 24, the Associated Press reported that Trump may have pressured Zelensky two weeks before he assumed office. According to its sources, the Ukrainian president gathered his advisers on May 7 to discuss how to handle Trump’s insistence that Ukraine investigate former U. S. Vice President Joe Biden and his son who worked for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. They also reportedly talked about how to avoid being dragged into domestic political disputes in the U.S.
Since the scandal broke, the Ukrainian government has chosen to keep its distance from a partisan scandal and not comment on it.
Frozen aid
In his testimony on Oct. 22, Taylor said he learned that nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine had been put on hold from a staffer at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during a work call on July 18.
“I and others sat in astonishment — the Ukrainians were fighting the Russians and counted on not only the training and weapons but also the assurance of U.S. support,” Taylor said in his opening statement.
The staffer said that the directive had come from Trump to his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who conveyed it to the OMB.
The U. S. Congress had approved $391.5 million in military aid to Ukraine in fall 2018. Initially, Trump told Congress that the aid would be released by the end of February 2018, then changed the date to May 23, 2018, and then delayed it until ordering the freeze in mid-July 2019, before his call with the Ukrainian president. The military aid was unlocked on Sep. 11.
On July 26, the day after the now infamous phone call between Trump and Zelensky, Taylor and then-U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker traveled to the frontline, where they met with the commander of the Ukrainian forces, Lieutenant General Oleksandr Syrsky.
“The commander thanked us for security assistance but I was aware that this assistance was on hold, which made me uncomfortable,” Taylor recalled three months later.
Strings attached
At a press briefing in Kyiv on July 27, Volker said that Zelensky’s invitation to the White House was not dependent on any conditions.
Taylor’s testimony contradicts that.
He said that, in mid-August — a month after Trump froze the military aid — he heard from Volker that President Zelensky’s aide, Andriy Yermak, asked U.S. officials to submit an official request for an investigation into Burisma, “if that is what the U.S. desired.”
It is unclear whether Yermak said it to get Zelensky a meeting with Trump or to get the military aid or both. Yermak did not respond to requests to comment.
In early August, Yermak met with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who was attempting to collect dirt on the Bidens, in Madrid. Before that, the two men had a phone conversation initiated by Yermak.
In a Sept. 23 interview with Ukrainian website Levyi Bereg, Yermak said he sought out Giuliani to tell him about upcoming reforms in Ukraine’s law enforcement and so that he would not need middlemen to meet with Zelensky’s administration.
“We can guarantee that, during our term in office, all investigations will take place transparently. No orders to ‘open or close’ (cases) from above,” Yermak said of his message to Giuliani.
In his testimony, Taylor recalled that Yermak contacted him on Aug. 29 and was very concerned about the military aid. A day earlier, Politico broke the story that Trump ordered the aid frozen.
“At that point, I was embarrassed that I could give him no explanation for why it was withheld,” Taylor recalled.
Taylor said that, initially, he assumed only Zelensky’s meeting with Trump in the White House was conditional on the investigations of Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election to the benefit of the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
In early September, he learned that “everything, including the military aid” depended on Ukraine’s pledge to launch those investigations.
U. S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told Taylor in a phone call that Trump wanted Zelensky to announce publicly that Ukraine would investigate Burisma and the country’s role in election interference in 2016.
A week later, on Sept. 8, Sondland told Taylor on the phone that he had talked to Zelensky and Yermak and that they had agreed to make a public statement in an interview with CNN.
But then-Secretary of Ukraine’s Security and Defense Council Oleksandr Danylyuk told Taylor that Zelensky was not planning to talk to CNN.
Danylyuk, who was present at the meetings with the U.S. diplomats and knew about Trump’s demands, resigned in late September citing a conflict with chief of staff Bohdan.
