Trump Call Reveals a Ukrainian Leader Short on Experience
While the U.S. has provided Ukraine with billions of dollars in bilateral funding and the EU has given about 15 billion euros.
(Bloomberg) -- When Ukraine’s president spoke by phone with Donald Trump in July, he’d only been in his job a couple of months. It showed.
A transcript of the call at the center of the impeachment debate around the U.S. president depicts a novice leader eager to please his more powerful counterpart.
A popular TV comic before assuming country’s highest office, Volodymyr Zelenskiy quickly calls scandal-plagued Trump “a great teacher” in cleaning up politics, going on to say how he enjoyed staying in Trump Tower during a trip to New York. At one point he offers Trump to hop on his plane to visit Ukraine from Poland, “or we can take your plane, which is probably much better than mine.”
But there’s worse. He complains openly that European leaders including Angela Merkel aren’t doing enough to help Ukraine, calling the U.S. “a much bigger partner than the European Union.”
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While the U.S. has provided Ukraine with billions of dollars in bilateral funding and supplied military aid, the EU has given more than 15 billion euros ($16 billion) in grants and loans since 2014, contingent on reforms. That includes 3.5 billion euros of investments from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Trump himself has been speaking out of late about the EU not pulling its weight in helping Ukraine. Zelenskiy’s remarks are unlikely to go well in Berlin or Paris, with French leader Emmanuel Macron also mentioned by name in the call.
“It will be a lesson for Zelenskiy,” Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta research institute in Kyiv, said by phone. “It may add some negative context to his relations with Merkel and some U.S. politicians from the Democratic Party.”
But most controversial of all, he appears keen to help Trump get his wish for a Ukrainian probe into Joe Biden, who’s among the favorites to win the Democratic nomination for the 2020 election. Biden’s son, Hunter, used to do business in Ukraine and Trump alleges that his father urged the removal of the top prosecutor to shut down a probe into the company he worked for.
Biden denies the allegations. But Zelenskiy offers an assurance that “we will be very serious about the case and will work on the investigation.”
Impeachment hearings may end up determining whether Trump’s request to Zelenskiy was acceptable. The man who took office in Ukraine just four months ago, could take a political hit of his own back home.
To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Langley in London at alangley1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrea Dudik at adudik@bloomberg.net, Flavia Krause-Jackson, Daryna Krasnolutska
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