i wish ukraine weren't in the news
but since it is...
This March, I was on a Ukrainian inter-city train headed to Ivano-Frankivsk, a small city in the country’s West, at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. I was sitting knee-to-knee, shoulder-to-shoulder with five other passengers in a stuffy sleeper car-turned-passenger shuttle. We didn’t speak much, except to offer apologies as we climbed over — and inevitably got caught on — each others’ limbs when we left the car to stretch our legs. My mobile signal dipped in and out. Every time I caught it, I impatiently refreshed Twitter, starved of the constant flow of information I had been consuming since I arrived a few weeks earlier to cover the Ukrainian election.
In one cell-signal haven, an unwelcome tweet crossed my feed; Donald Trump Jr. called for the American Ambassador to Ukraine’s resignation, claiming that the career foreign servant was partisan, among a host of other conspiracies about her work that did not square with the reality on the ground.
The man to my right, unabashedly reading over my shoulder, raised his eyebrows at the tweet. I shook my head and sighed. A week before the Presidential Election, a major test of Ukraine’s democracy, Kyiv needed signals of stability and support from one of its most important allies, not this turmoil and intrigue. I was dismayed that Ukraine would be in the news for this fabricated “scandal,” and not for the steps it had taken to ensure a free and fair election, for the progress it had made over the past five years, and for the passion that had characterized the campaign season.
Six months later, in an extension of that fabricated scandal, Ukraine has once again been splashed across the front pages of American newspapers and cable news chyrons.
The Trump administration — led by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani — claims, without a single shred of evidence, that as Vice President, Joe Biden pressured the President of Ukraine to fire prosecutor general to protect Hunter Biden, the VP’s son, who at the time was serving on the board of a Ukrainian gas company that had been under investigation. In reality, Biden asked Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor because he was stonewalling Ukraine’s anti-corruption reform efforts on which a billion-dollar loan guarantee was incumbent.
But the plot thickens; The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal allege that a whistleblower complaint that surfaced last week concerning a promise President Trump made to a foreign leader is about Ukraine. They report that POTUS pressured Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy to look into the alleged Biden scandal.
I joined PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff to discuss this story in more detail:
As I said on the program, one of the most disturbing aspects of this story — outside of the obvious and flagrant disregard for our national security that attempting to broker such an arrangement with a foreign leader requires — is the implications for democracy. Ours. Ukraine’s. The institution itself. How can we, the United States of America, have any shred of confidence in our democratic system when our President has allegedly asked a foreign leader (no fewer than eight times in one conversation, according to the WSJ) to investigate his most powerful political opponent in exchange for foreign aid? Any democratic doubters will point to this as proof that American democracy is not all it’s cracked up to be. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s reputation — which has improved slightly thanks to the reform it has managed to achieve in the past five years — is being sullied, its democratic future and ability to defend itself thrown into question. All of this, for the political benefit of one man.
This morning when I arrived at my office I had a message from a concerned citizen in Middle America who had heard an interview I did on PRI’s “The World” on Friday. “Clean up your own side of the aisle before you throw stones at President Trump,” he told me, in a long and meandering diatribe that somehow also managed to include the cement mixer Jeffrey Epstein sent to his private island. “Let’s all get together and be Americans,” the caller said. He didn’t leave a callback number. I wish I could tell him that I’m motivated not by a special animus towards President Trump or his administration, but by a desire to reach people exactly like him and explain what I know to be true about a country where I’ve lived and worked It’s what I’ve been doing since I tweeted about this story on the train to Ivano-Frankivsk back in March, when it first reared its grotesque head.
This story has not gone away for six months, and it will only continue to get more confusing and more entrenched until the next scandal comes along and subsumes it. But the issues it concerns will remain. In an effort to end this newsletter on a positive note, here are a few people I trust on Ukraine and adjacent issues. Consider getting your news on this issue from public media, leave the Twitter conspiracy theorists aside, and engage with the work of people who actually know the country.
Daria Kaleniuk, notable Ukrainian anti-corruption activist