Ukraine Puzzle Piece

Tolerance puzzle, via United Nations Development Program Ukraine. 

On the surface, so far, it's starting to look like the most explicit Emperor story yet.

All the allies, all the political parties, all the experts are agreed, Ukraine needs those weapons. Congress appropriates $391 million for the purpose, and the administration says it's releasing the funds on 28 February, but it doesn't happen. Then—after the presidential election in April installs a reformist TV actor in power there—the administration announces again that it's releasing the funds on 23 May. And again on 18 June. But it keeps on not happening! Why?

Apparently the bureaucratic bottleneck is in Mick Mulvaney's domain in the Office of Management and Budget (the State Department evidently sent OMB a notification on 21 June and never got a response), but the real sticking point is Donald Trump, who just doesn't want to, for reasons he's unable to clarify. Sometimes it's the sense that Ukrainian corruption makes him hesitate (which is hilarious, he's never shown any interest in that in his foreign policy decisions before), or that other NATO members don't contribute enough, which is simply wrong (Trump has variously said the US provides "the bulk" of Ukraine military assistance or even "all" of it, but Europe pays about two thirds).


An odd couple of diplomats, the career foreign service officer Kurt Volker (special envoy to Ukraine) and the political hire Gordon Sondland (ambassador to the EU, said to have earned his position by donating a million dollars to the presidential inauguration) decide that it's the president's "personal lawyer" Rudolph Giuliani that's really at the bottom of it, "poisoning" the president's mind with all sorts of right-paranoid stories about Ukraine. So they come up with a plan to talk or trick him into it: they'll get President Zelenskyy to make a commitment to investigating these things, including a theory that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has some corrupt Ukrainian association through a company his son worked for, and then Trump will be more willing to let the money go. It sounded to chargé d'affaires Bill Taylor (interim replacement for ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who was fired 18 June for, apparently, refusing to press the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden and his son) like something illegal, as he said in a flurry of texts toward the end of the episode:

And the texting ceases. It's hard not to see Sondland as realizing here that the texts are going to be looked at, and inserting that pious denial to make sure it gets in the record. At the same time, I have a clear sense that he thinks he's doing the right thing, on "the best pathway forward". This is the way to get the Ukrainians their money, which he sincerely wants them to have, by gratifying the whims of the sovereign, who's convinced the Biden investigation will change his life. The rationalization is that the sovereign isn't in control here, demanding a quid pro quo—Sondland is running the show, in his own perspective, mediating the differences and making everybody happy.

And there's a point there. This is how it works in an imperial court. You can't simply tell the emperor to do the right thing, you've got to tempt him with that extra scoop of ice cream. Taylor is right, in fact, it is a quid pro quo, but the mandarins can always persuade themselves of their own virtue.

But there's another puzzle piece I just ran across, which is that Trump called Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin on 3 May, for the first time in some 14 months, a couple of weeks after the Zelenskyy election (21 April), a call that has not received much attention. Trump said they mostly talked about Venezuela, but the Kremlin mentioned some other topics: bilateral relations, North Korea, and obviously Ukraine:

The situation in Ukraine was touched on in the context of the recent presidential election. Vladimir Putin emphasised that the new leadership in Kiev should take real steps to implement the Minsk Agreements, which are critical to resolving the internal Ukrainian conflict.

Which is really good enough to serve as my own personal smoking gun. Trump calls Putin to find out how the boss wants him to handle Ukraine after the election, and the boss tells him to stick with the ongoing policy of holding onto the money until the Minsk process yields a troop withdrawal, and that's what Trump does, stonewalling everybody from the State Department to Mitch McConnell—

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he was not provided an explanation for why the Trump administration held up aid to Ukraine when he pressed senior officials on the matter over the summer.

"I was not given an explanation," McConnell told reporters Tuesday as the congressional furor grew over President Trump’s interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

McConnell said he spoke to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo twice about the matter without receiving clarification for the delay in $391 million in aid to Ukraine.

—while Giuliani works his own ratfucking agenda against Biden, which tempts Trump tremendously, making him very cranky, and so on, through the phone calls (25 July for Zelenskyy, 31 July for Putin), the Madrid talks, and the revelations of recent weeks. Trump/Mulvaney put a suspension on the aid around 18 July, but they don't tell anybody (not the Ukrainians and not even Congress, as Kurt Volker's congressional testimony confirms, h/t Emptywheel).

I'm really starting to believe Trump may have made the deal with Zelenskyy and reneged on it under pressure from Putin in that last call, while Ukrainians pathetically kept checking their bank balance wondering where the money was.

Ukraine finally learned about the holdup in late August, nearly a month after the call, according to Olena Zerkal, the deputy foreign minister who was acting minister at the time of the call. And they only found out from a “letter sent to us from our Washington Embassy” that provided no explanation for the move, she said. Zerkal said she couldn’t remember the exact date of the letter, but it was before Politico broke the news of the holdup on Aug. 28.

(In the end, Putin got something like his way, as the "Steinmeier formula" for a full cease-fire seems to be coming into effect as of last night. I should add that this German-brokered deal ("special status" within Ukraine of the Donbas region, massive prisoner exchange, withdrawal of all Ukrainian and Russian troops from the region) looks to me like far from the worst possible outcome, assuming Russian troops keep their commitment to leave; when the whistleblower forced Trump/Mulvaney to release the funds after all, Putin may have felt forced to settle for less than he'd hoped..

But the US government has been AWOL in the process, losing immense prestige, and Trump hasn't got what he wants, yet, on his private agenda—of course there's nothing in Ukraine for Ukrainians to investigate—and may have hurt himself beyond repair by participating in Putin's and Giuliani's games. Here's hoping!