How did the Zelensky administration react to the attempts to embroil Ukraine in American politics?
Before the scandal surrounding President Trump's July 25, 2019, phone conversation with President Zelensky exploded in the world media in September 2019, the Ukrainian public was blissfully unaware of their leadership's difficult position vis-à-vis the US president.
Few Ukrainians noticed the June 2019 revelation in the media that Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani had used the services of two Russian-speaking American businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to establish contacts with Ukraine's prosecutor general and his predecessor in this position in late 2018. To Ukrainians, Giuliani's search for compromising information on Joe Biden was nothing out of the ordinary, because for decades Ukrainian politicians had exploited the country's justice system in order to undermine their rivals' reputation, if not to imprison them. The office of prosecutor general has consistently ranked near the bottom among Ukrainian state institutions as measured by public trust. Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin (in office 2015-2016 and reportedly eager to cooperate with Giuliani in 2018) was widely seen as obstructing the fight against corruption. This position became openly politicized under Yuri Lutsenko (in office 2016-2019), Ukraine's first prosecutor general without a law degree and one of Poroshenko's worst hiring mistakes. In other words, the Americans were doing what ordinary Ukrainians would expect from their own politicians.Zelensky, however, had been swept to power on a wave of popular discontent with precisely such backroom politicking. His hastily assembled team had few experienced political hands, but its members understood the need to project an image of transparent governance. Before the March 2019 election Zelensky's campaign managers were unaware of the difficult problem in US-Ukrainian relations they were about to inherit from Poroshenko.
When Giuliani first contacted Prosecutor General Lutsenko about the Bidens and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election, one can safely assume that President Poroshenko knew about this and likely authorized Lutsenko to meet with Giuliani in person in New York in January 2019. Moreover, Poroshenko himself met with Giuliani twice in early 2019. The Ukrainian president retroactively acknowledged the meetings but avoided questions about what was discussed there, other than American assistance with Ukrainian cybersecurity—a strange topic to discuss with a person holding no official position in the US administration. According to Parnas, Giuliani offered Trump's support for Poroshenko's re-election bid, complete with a visit to the White House, in exchange for an investigation into the Bidens and Ukraine's alleged role in 2016.After Zelensky took an impressive lead in the first round on March 31, members of the Poroshenko team started fighting for their political survival. Prosecutor General Lutsenko, who had the lowest chance of remaining in office, took a desperate gamble by denouncing publicly the US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, for allegedly impeding his fight against corruption. In his trademark populist style, Lutsenko claimed that Yovanovitch had given him a "do-not-prosecute" list of Ukrainian officials—a statement he would eventually retract. Lutsenko intended to demonstrate his usefulness to Trump, but instead he alerted the Zelensky team to the conflicting signals from Washington. Trump's removal of Yovanovitch in late April 2019, right after Zelensky's sweeping runoff victory, put the American dilemma at the top of the new president's agenda.
It remains unclear when exactly Giuliani first contacted the Zelensky team and whether the level of American representation at the new president's inauguration was used as an incentive in these early contacts. In the end it was rather low, with the highest US official in attendance being the then Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. We know that Parnas and Fruman stayed in Kyiv for Zelensky's inauguration in early May 2019 and Giuliani himself acknowledged having planned a trip to Ukraine for the same month.
However, he canceled it when the Ukrainian side refused to commit to his personal meeting with Zelensky. Meanwhile, the new Ukrainian administration remained shell-shocked by the American overtures, which bypassed the US embassy. Zelensky reportedly even digressed into discussing this conundrum during meetings devoted to energy issues. His advisors apparently asked senior Western diplomats whom they could contact in Washington to clarify how to treat Trump's personal envoys.In late May, Zelensky appointed Andrii Yermak as his aide for foreign-policy issues, and it was this lawyer and film producer— rather than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—who handled all the subsequent interactions of the President's Office with Trump's personal representatives and US officials pursuing a similar agenda, such as Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland. The Ukrainians understood the impossibility, for political reasons, of taking sides in the forthcoming US presidential election. The Manafort case and Trump's reaction to Ukrainian involvement in it communicated this lesson loud and clear. Yet, the Ukrainian negotiators also found themselves trying to persuade Trump's representatives that they were no enemies of the US president, who appeared to have taken umbrage at their neutral stand. As Yermak would later tell the Los Angeles Times, he spent weeks during the summer of 2019 “attempting to reassure U.S. officials that the United States had no enemies in the Ukrainian leadership,” all the while feeling “dismayed that [his] country had been dragged into Washington's political fights."16 From the Ukrainian perspective, the stakes were higher than the withholding of $391 million in US military aid that summer; they felt they were under suspicion as possible enemies. This charge brought fears of being denied American moral and diplomatic support, as well as billions in IMF loans, and perhaps even being abandoned to face Russia's aggression alone.
The Ukrainian position remained consistent: a commitment to political transparency and investigation of all suspected cases of corruption, but without promises to fast-track or prejudge any cases of particular interest to Trump. Occasionally, the two sides could be left with different impressions of the outcome, as was the case after Giuliani's meeting with Yermak in Spain in early August 2019, when Giuliani felt he had secured the desired promise. That same month Volker and Sondland drafted a statement that they wanted Zelensky to make about his commitment to investigate the Bidens and the issue of Ukrainian rather than Russian interference in the 2016 US election, but the Ukrainian president never issued it.
This entire struggle went on in private, without the Ukrainian public being aware of what was happening behind the scenes. In September 2019, when the US media revealed the content of Trump's July phone call with Zelensky, the impact on the Ukrainian administration was mixed. The transcription did not present Zelensky as a strong leader or skillful statesman; he was playing up to Trump and shamelessly complimenting him, while belittling Ukraine's European partners. But Zelensky's stand reflected the vulnerable position of his country. The revelation of Trump's perverse demands on the Ukrainian government lifted a burden from Zelensky's shoulders. Now that Trump's requests had become public—triggering impeachment proceedings in the United States—the Ukrainian authorities no longer needed to fulfill them. Zelensky's popularity in Ukraine did not suffer as a result of the scandal.