by John Bolton;
Trump congratulated Zelensky on the Rada elections, and Zelensky thanked Trump, adding, “I should run more often, so we can talk more often. We are trying to drain the swamp in Ukraine. We brought in new people, not the old politicians.”
Trump said, “We do a lot for Ukraine, much more than the European countries, who should do more, like Germany. They just talk. When I talk to Angela Merkel, she talks about Ukraine but doesn’t do anything. The US has been very, very good to Ukraine, but it’s not reciprocal because of things that have happened [Giuliani’s conspiracy theories].”
Zelensky answered, “You are absolutely right, one thousand percent. I did talk and meet with Merkel and Macron, and they’re not doing as much as they should do. They are not enforcing sanctions [against Russia]. The EU should be our biggest partner, but the US is, and I’m very grateful to you for that. The US is doing much more on sanctions.” He then thanked the US for its defense assistance, saying he wanted to buy more Javelins.
Trump turned to the real issue: “I would like you to do us a favor, because our country has been through a lot, and Ukraine knows a lot about it. Find out about CrowdStrike [a cyber company the DNC used], the server, people say Ukraine has it. I would like our Attorney General to call you and get to the bottom of it. The whole thing ended yesterday with Mueller [his televised House hearing12]: impotent, incompetent. I hope you can get to the bottom of it.”
Zelensky answered: “This is very important for me as President, and we are ready for future cooperation, and to open a new page in our relations. I just recalled the Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States, and he will be replaced to make sure our two countries are getting closer. I want a personal relationship with you. I will tell you personally one of my assistants just spoke to Giuliani. He will travel to Ukraine, and we will meet. I will surround myself with the best people. We will continue our strategic partnership. The investigation will be done openly and candidly. I promise as the President of Ukraine.”
Trump said, “You had a good prosecutor. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. If he could call you along with the Attorney General, and if you could speak to him, it would be great. The former Ambassador from the United States was bad news. The people she was dealing with were bad news. There is lots of talk about Biden’s son stopping the prosecution [against those formulating and executing the Russia collusion operation]. He went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution. It sounds horrible.”
Zelensky said, “Since we have an absolute majority in parliament, the next Prosecutor General will be one hundred percent my candidate. He will start in September. He will look at the company. The investigation is to restore honesty. If you have any additional information to provide us, please do so. With regard to the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Yovanovitch, I am glad you told me she was bad. I agree one hundred percent. Her attitude toward me was far from the best. She would not accept me as President.”
Trump responded, “I will tell Giuliani and Attorney General Barr. I’m sure you will figure it out. Good luck with everything. Ukraine is a great country. I have many Ukrainian friends.”
Zelensky said he had lots of Ukrainian-American friends too, and added, “Thank you for your invitation to Washington. I’m very serious about the case. There is a lot of potential for our two countries. We want energy independence.”
Trump said, “Feel free to call. We’ll work out a date.”
Zelensky then invited Trump to Ukraine, noting both would be in Warsaw on September 1 for the eightieth anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Poland, launching World War II, suggesting Trump could then come to Kiev, which Trump politely discouraged.
These were, to me, the key remarks in the July 25 call that later raised so much attention, deservedly so, whether impeachable, criminal, or otherwise. When, in 1992, Bush 41 supporters suggested he ask foreign governments to help out in his failing campaign against Bill Clinton, Bush and Jim Baker completely rejected the idea.13 Trump did the precise opposite.
The next week, the State and Defense Departments pressed to transfer nearly $400 million of security assistance to Ukraine, calling for high-level meetings, as bureaucracies do reflexively. Of course, the bureaucrats didn’t know that Pompeo, Esper, and I had been discussing this subject quietly for some time, making efforts with Trump to free up the money, all of which had failed. (By the time I resigned, we calculated that, individually and in various combinations, we had talked to Trump between eight and ten times to get the money released.) If the bureaucrats believed that a Principals Committee would change Trump’s mind, they hadn’t been paying much attention for two and a half years. I told Tim Morrison, Fiona Hill’s successor, to have the State and Defense Departments stop focusing on meetings, but I wanted to have the funds ready in case Trump did agree to release them. For that to happen, we needed to prepare the necessary paperwork, to be sure we could obligate the security assistance before the fiscal year’s looming September 30 end. Under long-standing budget rules applicable to the legislation earmarking these funds, they would disappear if not obligated by that point. That’s why the bureaucracy was beginning to show signs of agitation. Of course, one might ask why the bureaucracy didn’t start agitating earlier in the fiscal year, rather than waiting until the end and blaming their potential troubles on someone else. One might ask, but that’s the way bureaucracies operate, painfully slowly, and then blaming others when things go wrong.
On August 1, I spoke with Barr to brief him on what Trump said to Zelensky about Giuliani, and Trump’s references to Barr himself. I suggested he have someone rein Giuliani in before he got completely out of control. We also discussed the status of Halkbank, and the still-pending question of sanctioning Turkey for purchasing Russian S-400 air defense systems. Barr said he was waiting to hear back from Halkbank’s counsel on the Justice Department’s latest settlement offer. (On October 15, just after I left the Administration, the Justice Department returned a blistering indictment against Halkbank in New York, having obviously found the final settlement offer by the bank’s attorneys inadequate.)14
Esper, Pompeo, and I continued exchanging thoughts about how to persuade Trump to release the security assistance before September 30. We could have confronted Trump directly, trying to refute the Giuliani theories and arguing that it was impermissible to leverage US government authorities for personal political gain. We could have, and we almost certainly would have failed, and perhaps have also created one or more vacancies among Trump’s senior advisors. The correct course was to separate the Ukraine security assistance from the Ukraine fantasies, get the military aid approved, and deal with Giuliani and the fantasies later. I thought, in fact, I had already initiated the second, Giuliani-related track, with the White House Counsel’s office and subsequently with Bill Barr. There was also no point in encouraging more fruitless grinding at lower levels of the bureaucracy. None of that would have any impact on Trump’s decision-making and could only risk press stories that would dig Trump in even more deeply against releasing the aid. That, at least, was my assessment at the time, and one that I believe Esper and Pompeo agreed with.
We fully appreciated the implications of the approaching deadline, but we also knew our maneuvering room was limited, with the usually unstated problem of the 2016 and 2020 election conspiracy theories at the root. We all knew just what Trump’s thinking was, which was why we believed it was critical to move the issue for his decision only at the right moment. Timing the approach incorrectly could doom the assistance once and for all. Thus, when Trump raised the issue of Ukraine during the discussion of Afghanistan at Bedminster on Friday, August 16, asking how much we were spending there, I was worried that, in the heat of the contentious Afghan discussion, the Ukraine aid could be lost for good. Esper surprised me with his response, saying that Acting Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought had “stopped that,” meaning stopped attempts to keep the aid from being released. This implied the decision was made and further discussion foreclos
ed, which I definitely did not believe. Fortunately, Ukraine passed into and out of Trump’s free-flowing monologue without further incident.
The Office of Management and Budget had, of course, by then entered the picture, ostensibly for budgetary reasons, but we suspected more likely because Trump used Mulvaney to put a stop to any efforts by the State or Defense Departments to move funds they respectively supervised. The budget office was also trying to rescind more than $4 billion of foreign economic assistance (which affected only the State Department, not the Pentagon), an annual exercise. As in 2018, the budgeteers ultimately backed down, mostly because there would have been open warfare with Congress had Trump decided to proceed with rescission. Mulvaney and others later argued that the dispute over Ukraine’s security assistance was related to rescinding the economic assistance, but this was entirely an ex post facto rationalization.
With time drawing short, I suggested to Pompeo and Esper that I again see how Trump was leaning, and the three of us then coordinate our schedules to talk to Trump together, with which they agreed. The next morning, August 20, I took Trump’s temperature on the Ukraine security assistance, and he said he wasn’t in favor of sending them anything until all the Russia-investigation materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over. That could take years, so it didn’t sound like there was much of a prospect that the military aid would proceed. Nonetheless, with time running out, I said that Esper, Pompeo, and I would like to see Trump about the issue later in the week, which he accepted. Because of scheduling difficulties for Pompeo and Esper, and because I left Friday morning for the Biarritz G7 summit, Kupperman sat in for me on August 23 to discuss Ukraine. Unfortunately, it was during a meeting where Trump once again decided to do nothing after an Iranian-Houthi downing of yet another US drone, the third in recent months. The discussion on Ukrainian aid was brief. Trump punted, saying, “Let me think about it for a couple of days. I will talk to others at the G7 about it.” Esper, about to attend a NATO defense ministerial meeting, said he would press other members to do more on Ukraine, which could also help. It could have been worse, but time was still slipping away.
At the G7, it seemed France and Germany were more optimistic that Putin might take steps to decrease tensions with Ukraine, such as an exchange of hostages and the ship crews detained in November. Because Biarritz was so fraught with dangerous near misses on Iran, however, Ukraine played a relatively minor role (although most other G7 members strongly opposed inviting Russia to the US-hosted G7 in 2020). After Biarritz, having come close to resigning, I flew to Kiev to meet Zelensky personally, as well as key members of his incoming team. I hoped to ensure that the upcoming Zelensky-Trump meeting in Warsaw, which could not be avoided, would be a success. Flying to Kiev on August 26, I spoke with Volker about Ukrainian Independence Day two days before, which he thought Zelensky had handled well. Volker stressed that Zelensky had no wish to become involved in US domestic politics, although he was happy to have investigated whatever may have happened in 2016, before his time.
In Kiev, I met again with Danylyuk, accompanied by Chargé Bill Taylor and several NSC officials, for an extended discussion on how a Ukrainian National Security Council might function, as well as dealing with the Russians in Crimea and the Donbas. Taylor and I then laid a wreath at a memorial for the approximately thirteen thousand Ukrainians killed in the ongoing war with Russia. The next day, we had breakfast with Ivan Bakanov, then the Acting Chairman of the Ukrainian Security Service, confirmed a few days later to delete the “Acting” from his title. Bakanov was responsible for reforming the security services, a formidable task, but our embassy officials believed he was the right person for the job. Much of our conversation, as with Danylyuk the day before, was about Motor Sich and Antonov, two key aerospace companies that were in danger of slipping under Chinese (or other foreign) control, which would make it almost impossible for the US to cooperate with them. These firms (and many others) were the legacy of Soviet days, put there by those expert Communist economic planners for no particular reason, but left an independent Ukraine with significant assets it didn’t want to see slip away. Now here was a strategic interest that should have been a high priority for US decision-makers.
Next was a meeting with Minister of Defense–designate Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who was determined to make significant reforms in Ukraine’s military, in the midst of ongoing armed conflict with Russia and its surrogate forces in the Donbas. He favored using the pending US security aid not just to buy weapons from US firms, though he certainly wanted to do that, but also to obtain US help in building the Ukraine military’s institutional capabilities. By so doing, he expected to multiply the effects of the assistance into the future. (At the end of the day, I also met with General Ruslan Khomchak, Chief of the Ukraine General Staff, with whom I discussed the Donbas and Crimea at length. Khomchak was also an enthusiastic supporter of US military assistance: He stressed the need to change the culture of Ukraine’s military, including through providing English-language training and other reforms to break free from Moscow’s influence. He was also very worried about Russian efforts to build up military strength in the region, which would be a direct threat to both Poland and Ukraine. These were serious matters that I found both Zagorodnyuk and Khomchak taking seriously.)
We then rode to the Presidential Administration Building for a meeting with Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Bohdan, and one of his deputies, Ruslan Ryaboshapka. Bohdan had been Zelensky’s lawyer in private life, and also represented the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. There was visible tension between Bohdan and Danylyuk, who joined us a bit later, foreshadowing Danylyuk’s mid-September resignation as national security advisor to Zelensky.15 Danylyuk’s arrival also brought Ivan Bakanov, Vadym Prystayko (the Foreign Minister–designate), and Aivaras Abramovicius (the head of the state-owned holding company that effectively controlled Ukraine’s defense industrial base, including Motor Sich and Antonov) into the meeting. Bohdan stressed that Ukraine was counting on US support for the reform program. Although Zelensky had an absolute majority in the Rada, most of the new parliamentarians, along with Zelensky’s own inner circle, had no government experience at all. The Cabinet, accordingly, had been selected on the basis of technical expertise and included people from a number of the other political parties, and some career officials like Prystayko, who was then serving as Ukraine’s Ambassador to NATO, pressing its case for admission.
We talked about a wide range of issues, following which I had forty-five minutes alone with Prystayko to talk foreign policy. Interestingly, Ukraine, along almost unimaginably with State’s Legal Advisor’s office, had concluded that our withdrawal from the INF Treaty meant that the entire treaty had expired.16 Accordingly, as a successor state to the USSR, and previously therefore theoretically bound by the treaty, Ukraine was now free to develop its own INF-noncompliant missile systems. Given the situation with the Crimea annexed and the Donbas in jeopardy, this was no small matter for Ukraine, Europe, or the United States. Whatever the Western Europeans thought, Ukraine and other Eastern European states had their own ideas about how to respond to Russia’s intermediate-range missile capabilities.
As the larger meeting ended, before meeting with Prystayko, I pulled Ryaboshapka aside to speak with him one-on-one. He had not said much during the meeting, which I hoped showed his discretion. Ryaboshapka, as the soon-to-be equivalent to the US Attorney General, was the Zelensky Cabinet official most likely required to deal with Giuliani’s conspiracy theories, and also the Ukrainian official Bill Barr would turn to for any legitimate government-to-government legal issues. Here, I had my only conversation in Ukraine on Giuliani’s issues, and a very brief one at that. I urged Ryaboshapka to speak directly to Barr and the Justice Department as soon as he took office, figuring this was the best way to prevent fantasy from overwhelming reality. I didn’t mention the words “Rudy Giuliani,” hoping the omission spoke volumes. Time would tell.
The Zelensky meeting began at twelve thir
ty p.m. and lasted until about two. On the Ukrainian side were basically all those who had participated in the earlier meetings. Bill Taylor, NSC officials, and several embassy officers comprised the US side. Zelensky was impressive throughout, very much in command of the issues. He started by thanking us for keeping our Crimea sanctions in place and our continued nonrecognition of Russia’s purported annexation. I thought: If only he knew how close we were to giving all that away! We discussed Crimea, the Donbas, the failing Normandy Format peace process, and his desire to get the US and the UK more active in resolving the Russia-Ukraine dispute. Domestically, Zelensky said the fight against corruption, the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, was his highest priority. His “Servant of the People Party,” named after his TV show, had 254 Rada members, and he said that when the new session opened, they would introduce 254 reform bills, one for each party member to shepherd through. Zelensky emphasized that the time for promises alone was over, and it was now time to implement the promises he had campaigned on.
He said the issue that prompted his first call to Putin was trying to get the Ukrainian sailors released. He was determined to get the Donbas back as soon as possible and end the war within the Minsk agreements. Zelensky had very specific ideas for a cease-fire, starting at one particular town and then expanding it. There would be no diplomatic games from him, he said, but Ukraine needed to see reciprocal steps from Russia: he wanted to resolve the issue, not let it drag out for years. We also discussed the tricky issue of what would happen if the Donbas were resolved but not Crimea. No one, including the US, had a way around this dilemma, but Zelensky stressed that the West as a whole had to keep sanctions tied to the Crimea problem, not just ending the Donbas war. After discussing Belarus and Moldova, and their common problems with Russia and corruption, we concluded. There was no discussion of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or anything in Giuliani land. If this didn’t demonstrate what America’s real interests were, and what Zelensky should raise with Trump in Warsaw, I didn’t know how else to do it.
