Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will visit the White House on Friday, amid a deepening chasm with US President Donald Trump that could impact his country’s ongoing war with Russia.
Trump has sought to end the war through direct US-Russia negotiations excluding Ukraine. He has made personal comments against Zelenskyy, calling him a “dictator” who is unpopular in Ukraine and was good only at “playing[Joe] Biden “like a fiddle”. On Thursday, though, Trump walked back from the “dictator” comment.
Zelenskyy has maintained that a deal with the US — expected to be signed during the upcoming meeting — must include a security guarantee from the US, but Trump has not agreed to that. The US President has also insisted that Ukraine should pay back the aid given to it so far, a condition his predecessor Joe Biden had not put when extending the aid.
While it was expected that Trump would be less generous with Ukraine than Biden, his complete policy reversal — treating Russia with apparent respect and allies Ukraine and Europe with apparent contempt — has come as a surprise.
Amid this, many have pointed out that the US President seems to harbour a personal dislike for Zelenskyy. “Trump hates Ukraine. He and people around him believe that Ukraine was the cause of all Trump’s problems…he hates Zelenskyy with passion, and Zelenskyy knows it,” Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman who has once worked with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told Politico.
Trump and Zelenskyy do have a history going back at least five years, when Zelenskyy did not do something Trump wanted him to. Trump was impeached in 2019 over a phone call he had had with Zelenskyy, though the next year, the US Senate acquitted him. We explain.
The 2016 US elections and a conspiracy theory
Trump won the 2016 elections amid a cloud of Russian interference allegations. Probe by American authorities later claimed that Russia had hacked the emails of the Democratic Party and released them. The leaked documents showed that the Democratic Party’s leadership preferred Hillary Clinton as the Presidential candidate instead of Bernie Sanders, harming Clinton’s reputation.
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Trump, however, said the hacking was done by Ukrainians to defame Russians. Once he became President, in the fateful phone call in 2019, he even asked Zelenskyy to investigate the matter and return a server he believed was in Ukraine. Zelenskyy agreeing to this would have boosted the Ukrainian interference theory.
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump told Zelenskyy, as per the call details released later.
However, this was not the only favour he sought. He also asked Zelenskyy to probe Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, and made a White House visit for Zelensky and nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine conditional on these favours being performed.
The Hunter Biden angle
Hunter Biden was on the board of directors of a private Ukrainian company called Burisma. In 2016, when Joe Biden was Vice-President, he pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who had been charged with looking into corruption allegations against Burisma. That probe was dormant and the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, was perceived as blocking corruption probes in Ukraine by both the US and the European Union.
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Trump, however, wanted Zelenskyy to investigate Biden over this and discredit him before the 2020 elections. Zelenskyy did not open the probe.
Instead, the phone call, and Trump making US help conditional on his personal wishes being met, became the subject of an investigation in the US. The military aid to Ukraine was eventually released in September 2019, but Trump was impeached for his conduct.