'A lot of it started with Ukraine': Why the Trump-Zelensky call isn't just about Joe Biden
WASHINGTON – “They say a lot of it started with Ukraine.”
That one remark – made by President Donald Trump in his July 25 conversation with Ukraine’s newly elected leader – goes a long way to explaining why the Eastern European country and strategic U.S. ally is now at the center of an American political scandal with potential geopolitical ramifications.
For Trump, this isn’t just about Joe Biden. It’s also about Russia and now-former special counsel Robert Mueller. And about Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime 2016 campaign manager who is now in prison after making millions of dollars from a once-secret lobbying deal he had with Ukraine’s former pro-Russia president.
Here’s a guide to connecting the dots from Ukraine to Russia, from Joe Biden to Paul Manafort to Robert Mueller:
Why is Ukraine important to the U.S.?
Ukraine declared independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, and it is now a fledgling democracy with a pro-Western tilt.
“Ukraine is a country that has decided to turn to the West, meaning be pro-American, take on democracy and free markets and that’s a big deal,” Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Tuesday on Fox Business Network.
But now, Portman noted, “It’s sort of like the Cold War is being fought out in Ukraine again.”
Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014, a swath of Ukraine territory located between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Russian operatives and separatist fighters have since launched attacks on eastern Ukraine, and the Kremlin continually works to undermine the country’s sovereignty militarily and in other ways.
“This is very much a hot conflict,” said Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a foreign policy think tank.
It’s in America’s interest to stave off Russian aggression, particularly as Vladimir Putin looks to rebuild the Soviet empire, Conley and other experts say.
“Strategically we wanted to uphold Ukraine’s independence because it makes it more difficult for Russia to re-establish its imperial designs,” said William Pomeranz, deputy director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, a think tank dedicated to Russian and Eurasia research. The United States also agreed, along with several European countries, to defend Ukraine from attack after it relinquished its nuclear weapons arsenal, Pomeranz noted.
So it raised alarm bells on Capitol Hill when lawmakers learned that Trump had frozen nearly $400 million in military aid, approved by Congress, to help Ukraine stave off Russian aggression. (He later released the money under intense pressure from lawmakers in both parties.)
Trump has offered differing explanations for holding back the funds, saying initially it was because he wanted to be sure Zelensky would tackle corruption in the country and later suggesting he wanted European countries to contribute more to Ukraine’s defense.
Democrats charge that Trump was using the military assistance as leverage to force Zelensky to open an investigation that he hoped would tarnish Joe Biden, a leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
"He implored the president of Ukraine to work with his personal attorney to manufacture a smear against a domestic political opponent, using a malicious conspiracy theory that has been universally debunked by every independent outlet that has looked at it," Biden said in a statement released by his campaign Wednesday.
In the July 25 call, Trump made a point of telling Zelensky how generous the U.S. had been with his country.
More: What Trump and Zelensky said in their July 25 phone call
“We do a lot for Ukraine,” the president said in the July 25 call. “The United States has been very, very good to Ukraine.”
What does Trump’s Ukraine call have to do with Paul Manafort?
Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has essentially accused Ukrainian officials of trying to undermine Trump’s 2016 campaign by exposing his then-campaign manager’s lucrative lobbying work in their country.
In August of 2016, Serhiy Leshchenko, then a member of Ukraine’s parliament, held a news conference in Kiev and unveiled secret documents showing payments from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian leader, to Manafort.
The records came from a “black ledger,” which was found “in the burned-out ruins of the headquarters of Yanukoych’s party,” Leshchenko wrote in a recent op-ed outlining his actions. “Yanukovych had used the ledger to keep records of his illegal transactions.”
Leshchenko said he disclosed the Manafort payments to hold the American lobbyist and Yanukovych to account for throwing Ukraine into tumult and war with Russia. The revelations eventually led to Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign and sparked the broader criminal case against Manafort.
Giuliani named Leshchenko as one of Trump’s “enemies” in a May interview with Fox News, in which he also alleged "Ukrainian collusion with Democrats." And Trump himself has nurtured a grudge about Manafort’s downfall.
“That is the paradox here," said Michael McFaul, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama.
Trump “seems annoyed by the exposure of corruption” in the Manafort case – and similarly annoyed by the lack of corruption findings in Hunter Biden's dealings in Ukraine, McFaul said.
In the call with Zelensky, Trump pushed for a probe of Joe Biden, who in 2016 as vice president, sought the removal of Ukraine’s then-prosecutor general Viktor Shokin. European diplomats and the U.S. State Department were also pressing for Shokin's ouster, saying he was not aggressive enough in fighting corruption. But Trump and Giuliani allege Biden wanted Shokin ousted to stop an investigation into Burisma Group, a Ukrainian energy company where his son Hunter served on the board of directors.
Neither Trump nor Giuliani has produced evidence of wrongdoing that implicates Joe Biden or his son.
What’s the Russia connection and why did Trump bring up Robert Mueller?
The day before Trump spoke with Zelensky, former special counsel Robert Mueller testified on Capitol Hill about his investigation into possible collusion between the Kremlin and Trump's campaign aimed at influencing the outcome of the 2016 election. Mueller's probe concluded that the Russian government interfered extensively in the 2016 election, hoping to benefit Trump. Mueller told lawmakers that while Trump's 2016 campaign welcomed the assistance, his investigators did not gather sufficient evidence to prove a conspiracy.
Mueller's remarks clearly were still on Trump's mind the next day, when he was on the phone with Zelensky.
"That whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance," Trump said, according to a summary of the call released Wednesday by the White House.
Trump also mentioned CrowdStrike, a private firm that analyzed the intrusion into the Democratic National Committee's computers in 2016. The firm concluded that it was the work of hackers connected to Russian intelligence services.
"I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike ... the server, they say Ukraine has it," Trump told Zelensky.
It's not entirely clear what server Trump is referring to. But McFaul said Trump seems to be trying to re-litigate the origins of the Russia probe and raise new questions about an issue that seems to haunt him. The president has blasted Mueller's probe as a "witch hunt" and a "hoax," fearing it undermines the legitimacy of his election.
"The president continues to very much focus on people questioning whether he won the election in 2016 on his own or whether he needed that help," said Conley. "Even though (Mueller's probe has) been closed, he continues to go back to it."
Trump has boasted he's tougher on Russia than any previous president. But critics note that any decision by him to withhold military aid from Ukraine would have been a gift to Moscow.
James Lamond, senior policy adviser for the liberal Center for American Progress, said it reminded him of the moment in 2016, when the Trump campaign worked to soften the GOP platform on Ukraine. The draft platform called for providing "lethal defensive weapons" to Ukraine.
A Trump campaign aide reportedly worked to water down that line to say the U.S. should provide "appropriate assistance” to Ukraine. That move befuddled Democrats, Lamond recalled, because Republicans had spent years blasting the Obama administration for being too weak on Russian aggression and shying away from providing lethal assistance.
Trump's decision to temporarily freeze the Ukraine aid, Lamond said, seems more "transactional" than policy-driven.
"But you can’t separate it out in many ways from his general posture that has been so supportive of Russia's geopolitical objectives," Lamond said, citing Trump's attacks on NATO and other broadsides he has launched against America's European allies. "The pattern is clear."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Anatomy of the Trump-Zelensky call: Why it's not just about Joe Biden
