When Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky took a call from U. S. President Donald Trump on July 25, a few days after his party won a landslide victory in the parliamentary election, he was evidently pleased. It was the second time since the two had talked on the night Zelensky won the presidency in April.
“I think I should run more often so that you can call me more often and we can talk over the phone more often,” he said, according to a memorandum reconstructing the dialogue released by the White House on Sept. 25.
“That’s a very good idea. I think your country is very happy about that,” Trump replied laughing.
The world would have never learned about the content of that conversation had it not been for a whistleblower complaint alleging that Trump pressured Zelensky in the now-famous call to investigate Joe Biden — the former U. S. vice president and one of the main Democratic contenders in the 2020 election race — and his son, who had worked for the largest private oil and gas company in Ukraine.
The story exploded when the information about the nature of the call was leaked to the American press just days before Zelensky set foot on American soil for the first time as president.
Soon after, the Washington Post revealed a new damning detail: Trump had ordered $391.5 million in military aid frozen shortly before his call with Zelensky, which Democrats and others saw as Trump’s attempt to blackmail a foreign leader into going after his political rival. This led the speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives to launch an impeachment inquiry into Trump.
The unclassified memo showed that Trump indeed asked Zelensky for “a favor”: to talk to his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani about investigating the Bidens and to find an allegedly missing server of Democratic National Committee, which was hacked by Russians in 2015–2016. Both claims are conspiracy theories not supported by available evidence.
Moreover, the whistleblower complaint dated Aug. 12 and published on Sept. 26 corroborated the memo and revealed the efforts of senior White House officials “to lock down” all records of the phone call. The transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system used for classified information of a sensitive nature, according to the whistleblower.
Zelensky now finds himself in a difficult position, because what Trumps wants from him stems from conspiratorial plots that Giuliani has been pushing onto Ukrainian officials for months.
In particular, he claimed that Joe Biden had pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general back in 2016 in order to hamper a probe into Burisma Holdings, where his son Hunter was on the board of directors. Giuliani also alleged that Ukrainian officials of the previous administration conspired to help Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.
These claims are also not backed up by evidence.
At the first joint press briefing with Trump on Sept. 25 on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Zelensky told reporters he did not want to be involved in the 2020 U.S. election.
“I think we had a good phone call. We spoke about many things. Nobody pushed me.”
View from Ukraine
In Ukraine, the scandal did not make as big of a splash as in the U.S. and was viewed as domestic political infighting.
Alyona Getmanchuk, the director of the New Europe Center, wrote in a column for the New York Times that Ukraine was facing the double whammy of Russian aggression on one side and “Trump’s desire to be re-elected at any price” on another.
The U. S. is a key ally for Ukraine, and “it was bitter to learn that under Trump it joined the list of those who would use Ukraine to pursue their own narrow ends, and do so in ways that hinder our own efforts to improve our country,” she wrote.
But the prospect of Trump’s impeachment and the publication of the memo heightened interest, at least in Ukrainian media.
Ukrainska Pravda, an independent news site, ran an explanatory long-read titled “Impeachment for Trump. Ukraine is part of the story that can ruin the U.S. president.”
Russian-language Ukrainian news magazine Novoye Vremya placed the American scandal on the cover of its Sept. 26 issue. The cover depicts Trump in yellow-and-blue flames on a frying pan and a confused Zelensky shrugging his shoulders. The headline reads: “Burnt out at work.”
The phone call memo contained some details that could cast a shadow over Zelensky.
Specifically, he criticized Germany, France and the European Union for not helping Ukraine enough, admitted to having full control over the new prosecutor general, and badmouthed former U. S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.
Political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko says Zelensky did not expect that the full memo would be released, but it is unlikely to damage Zelensky’s rating. As of September, 71 percent of Ukrainians were satisfied with the president’s work, according to the Rating Group pollster.
“As a professional actor, Zelensky feels the audience. He wanted Trump to like him,” Fesenko told the Kyiv Post. “But he was sincere in his words, and many Ukrainians share the resentment toward the EU because of the Nord Stream pipeline and Russia’s return to (the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe).”
There are a lot of reasons for Zelensky and Ukraine to be unhappy with Germany and France, agrees with Andreas Umland, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv.
However, Umland says that Ukraine’s reputation won’t be damaged in the West because both Germany and France likely understand the situation in which Zelensky was placed.
Much worse was Trump’s proposal for Ukraine to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and just work things out.
“It’s an unexpectedly blunt statement,” says Umland, adding that the U.S. political elite and diplomats have a different position on the issue, even in the Republican Party.
However, “even bad news is good news for Ukraine, because it makes Ukraine more recognizable,” says Umland.
Since military aid is not mentioned in the memo of the July 25 call, Trump’s move to freeze the aid could have been interpreted differently by Zelensky’s office, Fesenko said. It could have been linked to another event: The Trump administration opposed the sale of Ukrainian aerospace manufacturer Motor Sich to the Chinese and warned the Ukrainian government against it in late August. The sale has not yet gone through.
The Bidens
For all Trump’s talk of the Bidens, there is much less to the story activities in Ukraine than the U.S. president wants to believe.
There has never been any investigation into Biden’s son in Ukraine. Moreover, there is no active investigation into Burisma Holdings.
Hunter Biden might have made a bad decision when he joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a Cyprus-registered oil and gas company operating in Ukraine, in April 2014. That same month, the British Serious Fraud Office launched an investigation into the company’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, for money laundering and froze $23 million on his firms’ U.K. accounts.
Back in 2014, Hunter Biden’s new job at Burisma raised eyebrows in the West, given his father was the U.S. vice president at that time. After all, the United States supported the EuroMaidan revolution, which had ousted corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych two months earlier. Meanwhile, Biden’s son had effectively gone to work for a company owned by Zlochevsky, the former ecology and natural resources minister under Yanukovych.
It is unclear what role Hunter Biden had in Burisma exactly. Officially, he consulted the company “on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities.” The company has not responded to requests to comment.
The British money laundering investigation quickly fizzled out due to a lack of cooperation from Ukrainian prosecutors. This allowed Zlochevsky’s lawyers to unfreeze his accounts in court. In January 2015, a British judge closed the case.
In May 2014, Burisma itself was under a different investigation into tax evasion and fraud in cahoots with officials of a state-owned gas company. But, as time passed, the fraud charges were also dropped. Burisma paid back Hr 180 million in taxes, and the case was closed.
There are still two active cases into the alleged corruption of Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources officials during Zlochevsky’s tenure. According to one case, ministry officials illegally issued gas exploration licenses to Burisma subsidiaries. The cases were transferred to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau three years ago but little progress has been made since then. The agency said that crucial evidence and time were lost due to the inaction of prosecutors who first took the cases.
The Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC), a Kyiv-based watchdog, said that three of Ukraine’s former prosecutors general — Vitaly Yarema, Viktor Shokin, and Yuriy Lutsenko — contributed to sabotaging the investigations against Burisma and its owner.
Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin spoke at a press conference in Kyiv on Nov. 2, 2015. Rudy Giuliani has alleged without evidence that Shokin, who held his post between February 2015 and April 2016, was fired on Joe Biden’s request to help his son escape prosecution. (Volodymyr Petrov)
In 2016, Biden indeed openly pressured Ukraine to fire its Prosecutor General at the time, Shokin, threatening to withhold over $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if the official was not removed.
But Biden was not alone in calling for Shokin’s ouster, which eventually happened in April 2016. Ukraine’s pro-reform and anti-graft circles had been calling for his dismissal for months because he obstructed or dragged out cases into corruption by Yanukovych and his cronies.
Shokin was replaced by former politician Lutsenko, who earned a reputation no better than Shokin and was hardly more effective. He kept his job until 2019 thanks to his political alliance with then-President Petro Poroshenko.
It was Lutsenko’s multiple interviews with John Solomon, a contributor to news outlet The Hill, that in retrospect added fuel to the conspiracy fire and, coming from a top official, legitimized these claims.
Lutsenko told Solomon in March that he would open an investigation into alleged interference by Ukrainian officials into the 2016 U.S. presidential election to benefit Clinton. Lutsenko also claimed that the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, led by Amb. Yovanovitch at the time, pressured him not to investigate the AntAC, a civic watchdog that criticized Lutsenko.
In another article, Solomon cited unnamed Ukrainian officials and Shokin alleging that Biden had pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin to protect Burisma Holdings and his son.
Later, in May, Lutsenko told Bloomberg: “All cases against Burisma were closed. I do not see any wrongdoings of any foreigners who worked for Burisma in Ukraine.”
Lutsenko and Giuliani had met twice before the Hill interviews and were connected by two Soviet-born Florida businessmen, according to a July investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Buzzfeed.
The two businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, set up meetings for Giuliani with Ukrainian officials, including Shokin, Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky, and Lutsenko, the OCCRP reported. They also unsuccessfully tried to organize a meeting for Giuliani with Zelensky through oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, the president’s former business partner.
Amid harsh public criticism, Giuliani had to cancel his trip to Ukraine in May. He had wanted to meet with the new president and said he would persuade officials to investigate Biden.
Manafort connection
The narrative of Ukraine collusion in favor of Clinton stems from an article published in January 2017 by the Politico news site, which claimed that Ukrainian officials tried to undermine confidence in Trump’s fitness for the presidency and had spread documents implicating lobbyist Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chair for six months in 2016, in corruption.
Manafort had previously worked as a consultant for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, helping the former president clean up his image both in Ukraine and the West. He was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison combined for tax and bank fraud and conspiracy against the U.S.
One of the main sources in the Politico article was Andrii Telizhenko, a former diplomat at the Ukrainian embassy in the U.S.
Starting earlier this year, Giuliani began to raise the matter in media interviews. At some points, his claims seemed almost incoherent.
In a May interview with Fox News, Giuliani mentioned “an already convicted person who has been found to be involved in assisting the Democrats with the 2016 election.”
He was referring to ex-Ukrainian lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist who used his time in office to back many reformist and anti-corruption initiatives. In May 2016, Leshchenko published information from the Party of Region’s “black ledger,” which showed the party paying Manafort over $12 million off the official books between 2007 and 2012. These revelations would lead to Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign in August 2016.
Leshchenko was not convicted of interfering in the U.S. presidential election — although a Ukrainian court attempted to convict him.
In December 2018, the Kyiv Administrative District Court ruled against Leshchenko and Artem Sytnyk, head of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, in a suit initiated by lawmaker Boryslav Rozenblat. The court concluded that both Leshchenko and Sytnyk had interfered in Ukraine’s foreign policy when they revealed that Manafort was listed in the “black ledger.” The court also concluded that these actions “led to interference in the electoral processes of the United States in 2016.”
After the men appealed, a higher court overturned the ruling.
