(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The scandal over Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rival might ultimately have no consequences for the U.S. president. It could, however, undermine a historical opportunity for Ukraine’s new leadership to drain its own swamp.
Various U.S. news outlets reported this week that Trump ordered his administration in July to withhold about $400 million in military aid to Ukraine. Later that month, he reportedly pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate the alleged involvement of Democratic front-runner Joe Biden and his son Hunter in influence-peddling in Ukraine. This is a problem for Trump if someone can demonstrate corrupt intent — that is, that he was using the state’s resources as a lever to achieve his personal campaign goals.
Naturally, Trump denies it. And he has valid arguments in his defense. For one, he can say he had legitimate reasons to delay the aid. At that time, for example, Chinese companies were about to buy a majority stake in Motor Sich, the Ukrainian maker of engines for aircraft and missiles — a deal that the U.S. had actively sought to block. That would be a credible motive for withholding aid. Also, Trump released the payment on Sept. 11, with no apparent conditions. So corruption will be hard to prove to any legal standard.
That said, corruption often doesn’t operate explicitly. Faced with a U.S. military aid delay on the one hand and Trump’s demand for a Biden investigation on the other, Zelenskiy could have figured out what was required of him. The same goes for the Biden case. A wealthy Ukrainian businessman hired the U.S. vice president’s son to be on the board of his natural gas company. Could Ukraine’s leadership not understand, without being told, that pursuing a money-laundering investigation into that businessman might have repercussions for relations with the U.S. administration?
Once upon a time, people in the former Soviet Union believed that things worked differently in the West — that business and government operated largely above board, according to transparent rules. This illusion dissipated quickly when the walls came down. Western know-how proved to be about a lot more than technology and accounting standards. Decades of interaction in the real world of winks, nudges, veiled threats and name-dropping helped make post-Soviet regimes as utterly cynical and devoid of principles as they are.
Now, people in the Western world automatically assume that anything post-Soviet is suspect. It doesn’t matter to those reporting on the latest U.S. political scandal whether Zelenskiy has caved to what they perceive as self-interested pressure on Trump’s part. It’s assumed that he might. After all, isn’t Ukraine corrupt through and through?
Yet Zelenskiy’s whole claim to legitimacy — the reason he was elected — rests on his promise to turn a deeply corrupt nation into one where everyone, from officials to ordinary citizens, actually ignores all the winks and nudges. On Monday, he advertised on Facebook a hotline Ukrainians can call when someone tries to extort a bribe from them or offer a kickback. “We’ll never overcome corruption if you close your eyes to it,” he exhorted citizens.
The U.S., and the West in general, should be taking Zelenskiy’s pledges at face value and helping him achieve his goal of cleaning up Ukraine. This means staying out of Ukrainian politics (and politically connected companies), and keeping official communications clear and public, with conditions for aid and other support always spelled out, so that both the government and ordinary citizens can understand them. Instead, the U.S. is casting a pall on Ukraine’s leadership by dragging Zelenskiy into its own toxic politics.
Ukraine needs breathing space to fix itself, and unless it does, it will never be a reliable partner to the West. The current scandal is not helping. The sooner it dies down, the better for Ukraine.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Whitehouse at mwhitehouse1@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
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