The Truth About Trump and Ukraine

Inside Trump’s vicious, illegal, years-long war on Ukraine—a clandestine effort that has dovetailed with the political, economic, and military aggression against Ukraine authored by Vladimir Putin.

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Preface: Bringing Proof of Corruption to Substack

Condensing a 576-page national bestseller with 44 chapters and 4,750+ major-media citations into a single Substack article is, of course, impossible. What this Proof essay aims to do, instead, is focus on just one of the narrative threads in Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020): Donald Trump’s thirty-year relationship with Ukraine, which bears no similarity whatsoever to the former president’s anodyne description of it.

Even in focusing on just one narrative, this essay must elide over 75% of the full story, which has twists and turns in it (as well as many suddenly appearing and disappearing characters) to such a degree that it can’t be reduced to a single article. This is why I wrote a book on the subject, and the reason even that nearly 600-page work benefited from the fact that much of its foundation had already been laid in two earlier tomes, Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018) and Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019).

I mention this only to underscore that if you have no familiarity with the truth about Donald Trump and Ukraine, what you are about to read will at once be shocking and the barest tip of a towering iceberg. And it matters—because the story of Trump and Ukraine, both the abridged and unabridged versions, are significant now not as dry history but because they may well determine the fate of America. The implications of what you will read below are that dire.

Please note that what follows is more akin to a novella-length nonfiction narrative than a mere essay. It may take you several sittings to read and digest the text in full.

{Note: To see the 12,000 major-media citations upon which this long nonfiction narrative is based, visit the links here and here, as well as the dozens of pages of linked endnotes here.}

Introduction: The True Story of Trump and Ukraine

A little over a week ago, former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton made a startling statement revealing that when Donald Trump was president, the longtime New York City real estate developer could barely locate Ukraine on a map. As with all else we’ve heard from Bolton over the last two years, the statement was a combination of a minute but accurate observation laced with some very subjective personal venom.

Trump may or may not be able to locate Ukraine on a map—neither possibility would be surprising—but if Bolton intended to leave the impression that Trump is broadly unfamiliar with Ukraine, that implication would not only be inaccurate but a deeply troubling cover-up of the true story of Trump and the largest nation wholly in Europe.

What follows is a summary of the exhaustive account contained in the 2020 bestselling Macmillan book Proof of Corruption. While, as noted above, it’s not possible to tell the harrowing, almost fantastically complex story of Trump and Ukraine in a single essay, it’s necessary to do at least as much as will be done here to aggressively contradict and undermine the lies Trump has recently been telling in interviews and speeches about his history of involvement in and with Ukraine. As with nearly everything we’ve ever heard from the ex-president, his own narrative isn’t so much a nub of truth packed in layer upon layer of deceit, but an intentional, almost brutalizing mass of prevarication that aims to manipulate voters at every point, in every contour, and without exception.

To hear Donald Trump tell the tale, he has long been a champion of Ukraine, and has admired Vladimir Putin’s handling of Russia’s western neighbor only as an academic might—acknowledging the purported tactical genius of Russia’s strongman without approving of his methods. In this fantasy world of Trump’s own creation (which is, unfortunately, now relevant to all of us because it reflects the belief of nearly 40% of Americans), in the same way that Russia has never had a more dangerous adversary than Donald Trump, Ukraine has never had a better friend than the former POTUS.

I’ve often written on social media, and on occasion here at Proof, that the best way to parse any statement made by Mr. Trump is to start with the assumption that the exact opposite of anything he’s said is true. While it’s an imperfect method of interlocution—sometimes when you take the opposite of everything Trump says, only 97% of it is true—it serves as a far better starting point then taking seriously or at face value anything declaimed by the former president.

In the matter of Trump and Ukraine, however, the conventional reading of Trump long advised by Proof and its attendant Twitter feed is wholly sufficient: Russia has never had a better friend among American politicians than Donald Trump, and Ukraine no greater enemy. As the picture atop this article implies, if Vladimir Putin is Ukraine’s pseudo-Biblical “Adversary”—a global actor as focused on eradicating the Ukrainian state as certain figures in the Middle East have been on eradicating the State of Israel—Trump is his malign instrument, the chief devourer of Ukraine’s hopes of becoming a Western-style democratic state.

Above all, the story of Trump and Ukraine reveals that America would not likely be in a world war right now if Trump hadn’t decided to run for president just months before visiting Moscow and entering into negotiation with Kremlin agents in November 2013.

But our story must start years earlier than even this, in the early months of the aughts.

The 2000s: The Seeds of Trump’s Hatred of Ukraine

The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump

In a series of ground-breaking 2019 investigations into Trump financial records long hidden from the American people, the New York Times revealed that from 1985 to 1994—a full decade—Trump was mathematically the very worst businessman in America, losing more money over this extensive period than any other American taxpayer.

The revelation underscored why Trump had fought so long, so hard, and (frankly) so disingenuously to hide his finances from U.S. voters, as even a partial accounting of his finances revealed that the rock upon which his entire political career was built—that he had a head for business—was a lie. Indeed, journalists soon discovered that Trump would be a wealthier man today if he had simply invested the $400 million (in 2022 dollars) he inherited from his father in mutual funds rather than embarrassingly ham-fisted endeavors like Trump Air, Trump Ice, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump Casinos, or Trump: The Board Game. {Note: As part of his myth of being a self-made man, Trump has consistently dissembled about the money he inherited from his father.}

But the abiding importance of the New York Times investigation to the Trump-Ukraine narrative is something else altogether: it helps explain why U.S. banks had stopped lending to Donald Trump by the aughts. Quite simply, Trump was—on paper—the worst investment an American bank could have made at the dawn of the new century.

Banks that lent to Trump in the 1980s and 1990s had spent years getting pennies back on the dollar, without any hope that Trump would ultimately make good on his debts. Indeed, Trump was more likely to drag his lenders into years of frivolous lawsuits to try to harass them into forgiving his indebtedness than to make repayment; all the while, he’d be finding new banks to borrow from—using grossly inflated estimates of his assets—and shoveling such borrowings into new sure-to-fail business ventures, with the process thereafter playing out again and again without hope of cessation.

This is why, by 2008, Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was in a private gathering telling potential Trump Organization business associates that a “disproportionate” amount of his family’s financing came from Russia. Just so, this is why Eric Trump, Trump’s second-eldest son, would injudiciously let slip to a sports journalist just a few years later that the Trumps had “all the money we need” from unnamed Russian banks.

The fact is, the Trumps at that point had no choice but to seek assistance from foreign nationals—as no responsible banking institution in America would deal with them.

But like any con man worth his salt—and the scion of the Trump family is one of the greatest in American history, matched only by P.T. Barnum—Trump was determined to turn failure into success, and in so doing erase any trace of his failures altogether. While he had ceased to be, by the 2000s, an actual builder, throughout that decade he used his kitschy NBC reality show to keep up the appearance of being someone who did more than (as was in fact the case by the middle of the aughts) license his name for transparently unwarranted mountains of income.

If American banks would not lend to Trump, making it impossible for him to remain the respected builder—if one who often defrauded his subcontractors—he once was, Trump and his family would pivot in two critical ways: they would focus even more than they had previously on brand rather than product, and they would seek to make friends and business associates around the world, especially in countries where local corruption made the playing field for foreign investors both wild and unscrupulous.

While the first of these two Trump family pivots was perfectly suited to Trump’s long-held plans to run for President of the United States—as early as 1992, he was telling strangers (in one instance, pro golfer John Daly) that he would be president one day—the second, which would see Trump wooing corrupt politicians and businessmen in former Soviet states to pay him fabulous amounts of money for nothing of value apart from the use of his name, was a potential stumbling block for a Trump presidential run. How would Americans react to a would-be Ronald Reagan-style “America First” Republican building nothing at home while selling himself freely to foreign bidders?

This latter question was for another day. Trump’s first goal was to make good on his early forays into the post-Soviet geopolitical sphere, particularly a mid-1990s trip to Moscow that had been arranged by the post-KGB FSB (Russian domestic intelligence) and that had seen Trump—per several accounts—act so risibly at private gatherings and behind closed doors that his actions led to the creation of substantial kompromat (blackmail material) against him by a government Vladimir Putin would be leading in just 48 months’ time.

Fortunately for Donald Trump, it was at his moment of gravest financial need—the early to mid-2000s—that two men moved into Trump Tower, the site of his personal residence in New York City: (1) Soviet-born Felix Sater, a man so trusted by Vladimir Putin that he could not only get Ivanka Trump a personal tour of the Kremlin but get her literally behind the desk in Putin’s private office (where she infamously sat during a 2006 visit to Moscow), and (2) Kremlin agent Paul Manafort, who moved into Trump Tower immediately after signing a $10 million-a-year deal with self-described Kremlin proxy Oleg Deripaska to advance Putin’s interests in Europe and the United States.

To be sure, when Sater suddenly appeared on Trump’s literal doorstep out of nowhere (surrounded by a cadre of individuals, such as Tevfik Arif, with long ties to Russian intelligence) it was at a time when Trump desperately needed to start doing major business overseas—and when no foreigner could do any major business in Russia without Putin’s say-so. But it must be understood, too, that in the first dozen years after the fall of the Soviet Union the influence of the Kremlin on former Soviet-bloc states was far greater than it is today; to please the Kremlin, in the 2000s, meant to presumptively grease future business deals in Ukraine, Georgia, and/or Azerbaijan.

These three former Soviet nations were all ones in which Trump desperately sought to do business in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Indeed, in the same year in which Don Jr. boasted of his family’s legions of Russian investors, he went on record saying that in Russia and the former Soviet states it was all about who you knew, not the content of your pitch. And more than any man then resident in America, the guy Trump wanted to know in 2002 was Vladimir Putin: Russia’s ruthless ex-KGB autocrat.

{Note: During the writing of this essay, Putin launched a new offense in eastern Ukraine—using one of the parts of Georgia he invaded in August 2008 as a staging area. This not only underscores Putin’s long-term intentions with respect to Ukraine, which could readily be used as a staging area for a future invasion of Moldova, but also what I’ve indicated above: that Georgia became a business target for Trump in part because it was vulnerable to the Kremlin’s will in the 2000s. By contrast, Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution put that country the farthest it had ever been out of Putin’s grasp, and therefore farther than ever from Trump’s avaricious plot to use his appeasement of Putin to do business in former Soviet states. Georgia now seeks emergency EU admission to evade Putin’s further influence, even as the Kremlin continues to back a pro-Kremlin regime in a breakaway region of Moldova. This latter fact raises fears that Putin could at some point use the same “justification” for invading Moldova from Ukrainian soil that he has already used in invading Ukraine—as if he annexes Ukraine, Putin will be well-positioned to declare Russia must enter Moldova to “aid” its loyalists there.}

The 2002 Miss Universe Pageant

As detailed in Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018) using eyewitness evidence, Donald Trump rigged the 2002 Miss Universe pageant to help ensure that the woman then universally believed to be Vladimir Putin’s girlfriend—Oxana Fedorova—would win it. Fedorova, the first Russian to “win” the pageant, was so ill-suited to the crown Trump had arranged for her to receive that she almost immediately had to be fired from her role as pageant queen, the first time such a firing had occurred in the history of the Miss Universe organization. {Note: Trump, famous for insulting his own pageant’s winners and losers alike, was suspiciously solicitous in all his comments about the pageant’s most contemptuously ungrateful prize-winner ever.}

It’s worth noting that Federova’s other reputed boyfriend in 2002 was another Vladimir, Vladimir Golubev—a Russian mobster known to control a significant portion of the real estate scene in western Russia, which was just the part of the sprawling country Trump had set the Trump Organization’s sights upon.

Whatever the eldritch reasoning behind Trump’s rigging of the 2002 Miss Universe pageant—a federal felony, but unfortunately one whose statute of limitations has run—the event (and Federova’s “win”) immediately preceded the felicitous appearance of Kremlin ally Felix Sater on Trump’s doorstep. In turn, Sater’s appearance launched a five-year flurry of foreign and domestic Trump Organization investments by powerful Russians that would reach its apex with Don Jr.’s unwise declaration on the subject in 2008. This was also the period during which Russian banks became the Trumps’ most significant lenders, per Eric, and during which Trump would partner with Soviet-born (in some cases Russian intelligence–linked) businessmen on U.S. branding projects. It would be impossible to enumerate in this one article all the business Trump did with Russians in the 2000s after the 2002 Miss Universe pageant, which is why a summary is provided in 2018’s Proof of Collusion (where space wasn’t at such a premium as here).

The Trump-Ukraine Saga Begins

But what did not happen in the 2000s—to Trump’s enormous rage—was the expansion of the Trump Organization into a former Soviet state Donald Trump had been reliably informed was still under significant control by Moscow: Ukraine. To the strongman-adoring Trump, it was incomprehensible; how could a man as powerful as Putin not be able to guarantee that a businessman Russia’s leader was wooing with investments would be able do business in not just Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, but all other ex-Soviet states?

And yet, this was more or less the size of things. Every deal that Trump tried to strike, particularly in Ukraine, failed. While he was able to move forward—if tentatively and problematically—with projects in both Georgia and Azerbaijan, Ukraine in particular remained recalcitrant. The juice that Trump had built up in Russia appeared to have far less purchase in Ukraine, which, unlike Georgia and Azerbaijan, seemed uniquely drawn to the West rather than Russia, and was therefore more committed (if still only lightly committed) to battling corruption in its major industries. Indeed, at least one prospective Trump real estate deal in Ukraine fell through in part because a criminal probe was launched against one of the men Trump had planned on partnering with.

The specific problems Trump had with Ukraine in the 2000s, well before he launched his political career, were these three:

1. Ukraine was insufficiently corrupt (or simply insufficiently solicitous of Trump and his “good” name) to allow the Trumps to do business there;

2. Ukraine was insufficiently under Putin’s thumb to make the Trumps’ entreaties in Moscow effective in Kyiv, Odessa, or the other Ukrainian cities they hoped to do business in; and

3. Ukraine was excessively European, meaning it called to mind, for Trump, the way in which Western institutions were rapidly closing their doors to him and not—by significant contrast—the way in which kleptocracies further inside Putin’s sphere of influence were exhibiting a pleasing deference to him (keeping in mind that this deference was concurrent to Trump telling everyone in Russia who’d listen to him that he would be President of the United States one day).

As Americans now know all too well, Trump is not a man to change his stripes. The three convictions he had about Ukraine in the 2000s—born of greed, corruption, and an unusual degree of petulance for a supposedly successful international dealmaker—would be precisely the septuagenarian’s sui generis “convictions” about Ukraine when he announced his long-planned candidacy for President of the United States in 2015.

Of course, it wouldn’t have done in 2015—or in the 2000s, for that matter—for Trump to declare publicly that Ukraine was insufficiently corrupt, insufficiently servile, and too European. So this was not what he said publicly of Ukraine in the 2000s, nor yet what the Kremlin would establish as its commonplace rhetoric on its neighbor to the west.

Like any committed autocracy, Russia would accuse Ukraine of being the opposite of what it actually had deemed it to be; and like any committed lover of autocrats would, Trump would start parroting the Kremlin’s line at every opportunity from the moment he became a politician. The three components of Putin’s and Trump’s rhetoric about Ukraine that emerged from 2000 to 2015 (albeit at different points for the two men), all three of which can be readily compared to the actualities described above, are these:

1. Ukraine is so exceptionally corrupt that no one can do business there, meaning that Ukraine does not experience merely the standard-issue post-Soviet-bloc corruption (most of which, incidentally, is sponsored by Moscow) but its own unique brand—one that renders it irrelevant to Western investors and easily explains why Trump failed spectacularly there (contrary to his self-sculpted image as a successful negotiator);

2. while irrelevant to the West, Ukraine is in fact properly part of Russia, and would be less corrupt and more vibrant were it to look east rather than west for guidance—as those men and women in Ukraine who truly care about their nation are ever trying to do (with Putin’s open, self-aggrandizing assistance and, we now know from Trump’s first impeachment trial, with the former president’s behind-the-scenes, much-lied about, self-aggrandizing assistance); and

3. far from being a potential partner to the West, Ukraine is in fact so lawless that it is a danger to its neighbors, including Russia, and must be brought to heel in some fashion (with Putin proposing forced demilitarization and/or neutrality, and Trump at first not speaking with much particularity on this subject but also doing nothing to gainsay Putin’s cynical, brutalizing assessment).

During the course of his seven-year political career, Trump has now echoed all three of these Kremlin lies. He’s singled out Ukraine as a global poster-child for corruption while saying nothing at all about Putin’s kleptocracy in Russia; he has inaccurately remarked that many Ukrainians actually consider themselves Russian, even going so far as to declare that he might recognize Crimea as part of Russia because (as he then falsely stated) “the people of Crimea” self-identify as Russian; and he has opined that Ukraine is so backward and lost that the United States could not possibly locate any national interest in guiding it, aiding it, or—even more unimaginable—coming to its defense. {Note: Trump has repeatedly called into question whether the United States would even come to the defense of its NATO allies, as required by treaty; Ukraine, as a non-NATO nation, lies even farther outside Trump’s perception of America’s responsibilities abroad.}

These self-serving, counterfactual “beliefs”—born of years-old prejudices that any reasonable person would recognize as irrational, and that Trump therefore cannot publicly acknowledge, lest they reveal his penchant for (a) seeking out rather than combating corruption abroad and (b) preposterously self-rationalizing his own bad behavior—would find their clearest expression in July of 2015, during Trump’s first significant press availability as a Republican presidential candidate.

2015: Trump Launches His First Attack on Ukraine

Among the many components of the Trump-Russia scandal now seemingly lost to time—in significant part because of the cultural machinations of Trump and his supporters—is an event in Las Vegas in July 2015 at which Trump took questions from reporters.

The event, a libertarian-themed conference known as FreedomFest, was attended by the chief Kremlin spy then looking to infiltrate the Trump campaign in its first weeks of operation, the since indicted, convicted, imprisoned, and deported Maria Butina.

According to a report by Politico, Butina began seeking a private audience with Trump almost from the moment he announced his candidacy for president—and was well-positioned to make such an entreaty due to her romantic relationship with top GOP political operative Paul Erickson (himself later indicted, convicted, and sentenced to federal prison), who had ready access to leading Trump advisers such as Roger Stone acolyte Sam Nunberg.

While major-media outlets would for months falsely report that Butina did not begin her efforts to meet with Trump until the spring of 2016, and even after fixing this error in reporting would for months thereafter inaccurately report that Butina had been unsuccessful in gaining any such audience, in fact a man who’d become such a staunch Trump supporter that he would actively work to help Trump stage a coup in January 2021—ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne—revealed in several live interviews during the pendency of the Robert Mueller investigation that (a) he (like Erickson) had been romantically involved with Butina as the Kremlin agent sought to infiltrate the NRA, GOP, and Trump’s inner circle of advisers, and (b) during this relationship he learned that Trump’s son Don Jr. had indeed secretly granted the Kremlin agent a private audience.

With all this in mind—as well as the fact that Maria Butina is not a reporter, never was a reporter, and in July 2015 the fact that she was not a reporter was known to many people connected to the FreedomFest-adjacent NRA leadership and top GOP operatives—it is astounding that, during his first major televised press availability in which he spoke on the subject of U.S. foreign policy, Trump decided to call on the Kremlin spy Butina, then posing as a reporter, to ask him a question about Ukraine.

As recently as 2013, Trump had boasted on NBC that when he appears on television, he knows that Putin is “very interested” in what he says—a likely reference to the fact that, as we now know from eyewitnesses, Trump spent his 2013 trip to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant not only meeting with agents of Putin (and desperately angling for a meeting with the autocrat himself) but widely declaiming that he’d be running for president in 2016. So when Trump, knowing himself to be on camera in July 2015, called on a Russian spy (one who his eldest son would secretly meet with) to give him an opportunity to address the Ukraine issue in a way that would quickly get back Putin—at an event focused on gun rights and in no way associated with U.S. foreign policy—it was highly irregular. Indeed, it was highly irregular even before Butina was outed as a Kremlin spy who had penetrated the highest levels of the GOP, and even before it was known that the Trump family had gone to great lengths to meet Butina in secret.

Butina’s question for Trump was the predictable one: what was Trump’s view of U.S. sanctions on Russia over its 2014 invasion of Ukraine?

Trump’s equally predictable, if nevertheless stunning response: “I know Putin, and I’ll tell you what: we’d get along with Putin [if I were President of the United States]. Putin has no respect for President Obama. Big problem! Big problem! And Russia has been driven…together with China [by Obama administration policies]….that’s a horrible thing for this country. We have made them [Russia and China] friends. Because of incompetent leadership [from President Obama]. I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin.” Of the sanctions specifically, Trump told the Russian spy, “[If I were President of the United States], I don’t think you’d need the [Ukraine-related] sanctions. I think we [Putin and I] would get along very well.” Trump added—as will shortly become critical—that he was specifically troubled by the fact that lucrative Russian energy deals were being made with China rather than America.

Besides the obvious fact here—that nothing Trump said about either Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, or Xi Jinping was actually true, other than Putin’s obvious preference for Trump to become the next U.S. president—what was striking in Trump’s response was how ardently he associated the sanctions the U.S. government had put on Russia for invading Europe with Obama specifically. In blaming the sitting U.S. president for a war crime committed by Putin, Trump underscored how passionately and irrationally he saw reversing sanctions on Russia as an opportunity to (a) expand and deepen his pre-existing, much-bragged about relationship with Putin (such as it actually was at the time, the truth of which has never been entirely clear), and (b) stick it to Obama, a Black man the notoriously racist Trump personally loathed, had repeatedly lied about as to the circumstances of his birth and his longstanding religious (Christian) faith, and who allegedly was one of the reasons Trump decided to run for president in 2016.

(Indeed, Trump would say something to this very effect in October 2020, telling then-candidate Joe Biden, “You know, Joe, I ran because of you. I ran because of Barack Obama. Because you [and Obama] did a poor job. If I thought you [two] did a good job [in the White House], I would have never run.” The truth of this notwithstanding—Trump had been planning to run for president for a quarter-century by the time he announced his candidacy in mid-2015—the comment underscored that denigrating the policies of Obama’s administration was in some way a key motivator for Trump.)

Tellingly, Trump actually began his response to Butina by interrupting her as she was identifying herself as Russian. “Ah, Putin!” he crowed. Then, sarcastically: “Good friend of Obama, Putin!” Recall here that, per witnesses, Trump had spent much of his time around Putin’s inner circle in Moscow, just 18 months prior, denigrating the then-sitting president to America’s adversaries, and indicating that he’d be a far better friend to Russia than Obama (who’d shortly be leveling sanctions over Ukraine). “He [Putin] likes Obama a lot”, Trump’s interjection concluded, again with clear sarcasm.

In many respects this seemed like a prepared response from Trump, as it served two purposes which were vital for him, and did so even before Butina’s question had been posed: (1) it mentioned Putin by name, which the incipient question did not call for but which helped ensure Putin would hear whatever Trump said next (as Trump had by then invoked the autocrat’s name repeatedly), and (2) it seemed to be intended to call to mind—perhaps even Putin’s mind specifically—the fact that Trump had some sense of Putin’s displeasure with Obama, and that Trump personally desired for this displeasure (which in July 2015 arose primarily from U.S. sanctions) to be alleviated.

As we saw above, Trump would go on to reassure Putin—through his reply to Butina’s question—that Obama’s gravest offence against the Kremlin would be reversed in any future Trump presidency.

It is striking, in retrospect, how much Trump associated the matter of Russia and Ukraine with his hatred of Obama back in mid-2015. The beginning of his answer to Butina, issued with a clear note of irritation, was this: “Okay, Obama gets along with nobody. The whole world hates us. You know, it’s an amazing thing: you look at Mexico, they hate us, they hate our leadership, and yet they’re making a fortune [from their dealings with the United States]. China! [It] hates us. China is building ports in the South China Sea—we could never do a thing like that because we’d have to get environmental impact statements, okay?—…so China hates us, yet they’re making a fortune [from their dealings with the United States]. Everybody hates us. And yet they make money with us. With me [as President of the United States], we’re going to make money on them and they’re going to like us.” Given Obama’s significant popularity worldwide according to every poll ever taken on the subject, it’s odd that Trump’s attacks on Obama would so focus on his popularity. It certainly does raise the question of with whom Donald Trump had been talking politics over the years.

Meanwhile, the message Trump sent, from Vegas, to Ukraine—which was then, lest we forget, a U.S. ally in a hot war with Putin and Russia—could not have been clearer: Trump saw the fate of Ukraine as being dwarfed in significance by (a) his hatred of Obama, (b) his affinity for Putin, and (c) his obsession with money-making, which he claimed (in ways he’d never explain during the campaign) would be best served by the United States becoming Russia’s foremost ally. What deals did Trump plan to have the U.S. do with a nation whose economy is considerably smaller than ours, and which focuses its international dealings on a natural resource (oil) the U.S. actually possesses in abundance? No one knew in July 2015, and no one knows now, though all the world would subsequently learn that as Trump spoke to Butina in Las Vegas in July 2015 he remained under a Letter of Intent with Putin’s architect (Aras Agalarov) to build a tower in Moscow that would be the most lucrative contract Trump had ever signed.

Given that we’ve no evidence whatsoever that Trump had a contract between the U.S. government and the Kremlin in mind when he said to a Kremlin spy, “We’re going to make money on [dealings with Russia]”, it’s hard not to conclude that Trump was instinctively referring to the Trump Organization and his own interests in saying this.

Remarkably, Trump didn’t even acknowledge the existence of Ukraine in his response to Butina, despite her question being on U.S. policy toward Ukraine following Russia’s unprovoked attacks on that country. In fact, so little did Ukraine rate in Trump’s mind that he didn’t even mention Russia’s invasion of it, or the reason sanctions had been leveled against Russia, or the fact that at the very moment he was speaking Ukraine was continuing what had by then been a year-plus military campaign to maintain its existence as a nation-state. How terrifying must Trump’s obsession with Putin, and his disregard for sanctions on Russia, have seemed to our ally Ukraine in July of 2015?

But Trump didn’t stop there.

Within a month of implicitly declaring himself disinterested with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or any consequences attaching thereto, Trump summoned to Trump Tower the U.S. national security expert apparently most beloved by Russian intelligence: Michael Flynn. Not only had Flynn urged, while at the DIA, such close cooperation between U.S. and Russian intelligence that it unnerved his superiors and contributed to his ultimate firing by Obama, he was also, at the time Trump summoned him to his home, working on a grand bargain whose aim was precisely the policy position Trump had just announced in Las Vegas days earlier, and whose subject was precisely the one Trump had seemed so intent upon in Vegas: sanctions relief and energy, respectively.

{Note: See the 2019 book Proof of Conspiracy for a full accounting of this “grand bargain.”}

The ideas Flynn had about Russian sanctions relief and the importance (as Trump had just spoken of in Vegas) of Americans finding ways to make money off energy deals with the Kremlin pleased Trump sufficiently that he immediately made Flynn his most trusted national security adviser; put him on his shortlist for Vice President; never appointed him formally to his public National Security Advisory Committee (see below), ensuring that Flynn’s foreign policy agenda and odd trips abroad would inform Trump’s agenda but never face media scrutiny; and calmly watched as Flynn’s proposed bargain came to encompass lucrative financial opportunities for at least two of his best friends: Thomas Barrack and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom Trump had had past financial dealings with that meant their earnings could redound to his benefit (Rudy via uncharged legal services, Barrack via discharged loans or new investments).

And of course Trump would hire Flynn as his first National Security Advisor, despite one of the only pieces of advice Barack Obama ever gave him being to not hire Flynn.

In short, within a matter of weeks of announcing his opposition to sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, and his concurrent announcement that his focus was on working with Russia on lucrative energy deals, Trump would have crafted a sub rosa foreign policy agenda with precisely these two goals at the top of its first page—both pursued by a man whose obsession with building liaisons with Russia military intelligence had played a major role in getting him booted out of the U.S. government.

But Trump still wasn’t done staking positions any Ukrainian would’ve deemed hostile.

Within a matter of days of Flynn joining Team Trump, Trump had signed his second Letter of Intent to build a Trump Tower Moscow, this time using his fixer Michael Cohen as his primary agent. This second Letter of Intent would fairly soon see Cohen directly contacting the Kremlin—the very entity Trump’s top national security adviser Michael Flynn was working with on a lucrative multinational deal involving Ukraine-related sanctions and Russian energy—right around the time that Flynn traveled once again to Russia, this time to meet with Vladimir Putin face-to-face in December 2015 (a meeting that occurred shortly after another meeting between Flynn and a Kremlin official, this one a secret rendezvous with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak at his private residence in Washington, DC).

And so it was that by the end of 2015 Donald Trump had committed himself to giving Putin as much of Ukraine as Putin wanted to take without punishment, even as Trump simultaneously sought to (a) close the most lucrative real estate deal of his business career with the Kremlin’s (necessary) blessing, and (b) had developed his foreign policy agenda as to Russia concurrent with a secret multinational energy deal that would shortly involve several of his friends. Meanwhile, despite all of this—and despite the comments his sons Don and Eric had already made about their father’s reliance on Russian investors—Trump was assuring U.S. voters that he had no involvement with Russia of any kind. And throughout it all, his ancient rage at Ukraine still simmered.

That a presidential candidate would lie so brazenly about a subject that, on the face of it, he shouldn’t have had to lie about—Trump could legally have had business interests in Russia at the time he announced his candidacy for POTUS, as long as investigation of these interests wouldn’t reveal that they were corruptly informing his policy agenda, as this would raise concerns about bribery—was almost certainly a major reason that the de rigueur opposition research that was paid for by Trump’s GOP primary opponents in 2015 focused, in part, on Trump’s dealings in Russia. No investigator worth his or her salt would have failed to inquire about why Trump felt it necessary to lie about his dealings with Russia; for that matter, no investigator worth his or her salt would have failed to see, almost instantaneously, that these dealings were universally suspicious and clandestine as well as possibly corrupt. (That any opposition research on Trump’s Russia dealings would require the involvement of Russian sources goes without saying; anyone who says otherwise has never been involved with professional investigations.)

So when former MI6 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele—one of the top Russia experts at the foreign intelligence agency most closely allied with America’s FBI and CIA—began investigating Trump’s business activities at the request of Trump’s GOP primary opponents in 2015, it was no surprise that the investigation ultimately bore fruit. And much of the fruit it bore was consistent with what we now know to be true:

1. Vladimir Putin did seek to sway Trump’s views on foreign policy via real estate deals involving wealthy Russian nationals under the Kremlin’s thumb;

2. Michael Cohen was taking the lead, on Trump’s side, in pursuing these covert, lucrative, quid pro quo-implicating real estate deals;

3. the Kremlin did have ample opportunities to accumulate kompromat on Trump, and a longstanding interest in doing so due to Trump’s self-publicized political ambitions;

4. in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Putin’s attention was on ensuring that all sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine be removed, and supporting Donald Trump’s candidacy (covertly) on this basis;

5. concurrent with Putin’s plot to bribe and aid Trump, there had been meetings between Trump advisers and Kremlin agents in both the U.S. and Russia;

6. Paul Manafort was taking the lead in the covert collusion that these meetings signified; and

7. Trump was extremely interested in extracting some mysterious, as-yet not fully explained form of financial value from multinational Russian energy deals.

Steele’s reports, ultimately paid for by a non-partisan investigative firm (which had been retained by a law firm working for the Hillary Clinton campaign), reported back the above accurate information—with which the Clinton campaign itself did nothing, though both Steele and some of those in the chain of custody of his raw intelligence (including Republican senator John McCain of Arizona) sought to apprise the FBI of its existence and potential significance, the latter of which was objectively undeniable.

{Note: According to even the far-right Daily Caller, the alleged “salacious” information about Trump’s fall 2013 visit to Moscow that was contained in Steele’s documents was accumulated in 2015—as Steele was being paid by Republicans to investigate Trump’s past trips to Russia.}

As we now know, and as was only hinted at in Steele’s raw intelligence, perhaps the most significant occurrence in this entire sequence of significant Trump-Russia facts was the initial decision by Trump to bring aboard his presidential campaign a man he had every reason to know could assist him in making common cause with the Kremlin over U.S. foreign policy, global energy policy, and side deals that could make Trump and his family even more wealthy than they already were.

That man’s name was Paul Manafort.

2016: Trump Launches His Second Attack on Ukraine

It is astonishing that Trump and his political allies have spent his post-presidency comparing his Ukraine policy to that of the Obama administration, given that Trump personally authored the transition of the Republican Party from a pro-Ukraine to a pro-Russia political organization—and did so, predominantly if not exclusively, in public.

Trump’s wrenching of the GOP away from it (and America’s) traditional allyship with Ukraine began in secrecy, however, even as it coincided with the period in February and March 2016 when it became clear Trump would be 2016 Republican presidential nominee. It was at this point that Trump and his team first fully appreciated that in order for the New York City businessman’s political career to continue, they would now need to woo political independents and moderate Democrats, not just the right-of-right-of-center Republicans who habitually vote in GOP primaries.

But Trump did not respond to his new (if unofficial) status as the prohibitive favorite to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination by moderating his rhetoric or even turning his policy agenda toward the quickly vanishing middle ground of U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Instead—and concurrent with Russian intelligence dramatically ramping up its cyberwar against the United States—Trump turned his campaign toward more radical policy positions and more allyship with a nation his party had positioned itself in opposition to for (by then) over seven decades: Russia.

{Note: Recall that it was the Republican Party’s 2012 nominee for President of the United States, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah—not President Obama—who had identified Russia as the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States. As of Trump’s emergence into American politics, there was significant cause to say that the GOP generally took an even harder line on Russia than the Democrats. In addition to President Obama somewhat underestimating the Russian threat, future Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton had infamously urged a fanciful “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations. While by the time of her 2016 candidacy for the presidency Clinton was significantly more feared by Vladimir Putin than any highly partisan GOP presidential candidate—let alone the avaricious, fundamentally apolitical opportunist Trump—it remains the case that the GOP, prior to the 2015 launch of the 2016 election cycle, was more hawkish on Russia than the Democrats, acknowledging here that, as both political parties were relatively hawkish on Russia, this was merely a matter of relative positioning.}

It was not possible in the early spring of 2016, nor is it possible now—six years later—to identify any conventional political strategy in Trump’s adoption of the most pro-Russia foreign policy agenda in the history of American politics. His advocacy of close-knit U.S.-Russian relations was sure to flummox Republicans of every stripe, who had just spent the last eight years watching the Democrats fail to achieve any success via precisely this stratagem (a failure capped by Russia’s invasion of Europe in February 2014). Meanwhile, Trump’s abandonment of a key U.S. ally—Ukraine—was unlikely to win him any new votes among political independents or moderates in the United States. There remain no conceivable explanations for Trump’s foreign policy agenda but one of these two: (1) Trump never expected to win the presidency, and was using his candidacy merely to build his international profile as a power-broker, with the hope of parlaying that expanded profile into lucrative international business deals (most notably in Russia, as discussed above), or (2) he, members of his political team, or he and those on his political team believed foreign powers had sufficient designs on stealing the 2016 presidential election on behalf of the candidate most favorable to their own interests that it was a viable political strategy to traitorously appeal to these foreign powers and their interests. Of course, it’s also possible that a combination of these two strategies was at work inside Team Trump beginning in February of 2016.

What we know for certain is that in February of 2016, partly in response to media criticism of his lack of foreign policy chops and partly in response to his unofficial status as the new prohibitive favorite to be the GOP presidential nominee, Trump began to put together a cadre of national security advisers who would, by late March 2016, congeal into what was termed the 2016 Trump campaign’s National Security Advisory Committee (NSAC).

In the annals of U.S. history, Trump’s 2016 National Security Advisory Committee should go down as one of the strangest and most unsettling political entities created by any political party or politician, rivaling and exceeding in sheer preposterousness and even dangerousness former President Richard Nixon’s now-infamous Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP). Trump could hardly have found less qualified individuals for his national security advisory corps, which raised questions at the time—questions that would eventually be revealed as richly warranted—about whether he intended to actually take any advice on national security from the NSAC. Both Trump’s handling of the group and statements from those in the group at the time confirm that its use and purpose was murky from the moment of its creation.

This isn’t to say that Trump’s NSAC didn’t do anything, as it did, but rather that it didn’t do anything as a group. It is believed to have met in full only once, in late March 2016, for a photo op; after that gathering—intended primarily to convince the media and U.S. voters that Trump was receiving above-board foreign policy advice rather than (as would turn out to be the case) clandestine assistance from foreign nationals and agents like Dimitri Simes, Yousef al-Otaiba and Paul Manafort—the work of the NSAC occurred entirely among small subunits of its total number or, more commonly, in tasks which were carried out in near-total secrecy by its most unorthodox members.

The first person Donald Trump hired to advise him on foreign policy was the almost unimaginably unqualified Carter Page, a barely coherent and undistinguished oddball who worked in a building adjacent to (and indeed connected to, via a private walkway) Trump Tower. Page was best known for being so fawningly, obsequiously pro-Kremlin that no one in his industry took him seriously. I say that Page was “best known” for this in March 2016—to the extent he was known by anyone at all—but it would be more appropriate to say that Page was best known in this way by anyone in the general public who knew him. Privately, Page was well-known to federal law enforcement as an American who Russian intelligence had sought to recruit to spy against his country; who, while well aware that he was being recruited, had given non-public information about the U.S. energy sector to men he knew were Russian spies; and who, after being hauled into an FBI office and informed he was being recruited by Russian intelligence, continued to gleefully term himself as a “Kremlin adviser” in private correspondence.

Page was, in short, not a man any U.S. political candidate in history would have hired.

But Trump did not want, when he brought Page onto his campaign in February 2016, what any other U.S. political candidate in history had wanted: to serve his country. As would subsequently be revealed by his friend, fixer, and attorney Michael Cohen, the 2016 Trump campaign was created as an international “infomercial” for the Trump Organization. As to whether Trump needed to become President of the United States to have his infomercial reach its maximum effectiveness, it was unclear, and indeed it appears the candidate himself was rather indifferent on the question. What we know is that in February and March 2016 Trump wanted to build a national campaign that would appeal to potential future international business partners; whether that appeal would evaporate if Trump were to lose the 2016 election was apparently not as much on the businessman’s mind in the early spring of 2016. In this respect, Page was the perfect hire: a man without any utility but to signal friendship and goodwill toward the Kremlin, with whom Trump (via Cohen) was negotiating a Trump Tower Moscow real estate deal at the very moment Page was made Trump’s first NSAC member. The signal to the Kremlin could not have been clearer—and the fact that it was received is underscored by the fact that Page was invited to Moscow by Kremlin agents almost immediately after he joined the Trump campaign. During this trip Page met with top Kremlin officials, as well as a Kremlin agent accurately named in Steele’s dossier; he would go on to lie on national television about these meetings, having told the truth to the Trump campaign only (which truth a campaign rep later lied about to Congress).

The second man brought aboard the NSAC was Trump’s top ally in the U.S. Senate, Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, who at one time had been respected for his foreign policy chops but would, under the influence of Trump, shortly be known for just two things: (1) repeatedly lying to Congress under oath about his clandestine contacts with Russian agents during the 2016 presidential campaign, and (2) exhibiting such concern about Trump’s stance toward the Kremlin amid the campaign that he recused himself from the subsequent Trump-Russia investigation immediately—apparently believing that overseeing the case would submerge him deeper in Trump’s Russia machinations.

The third NSAC hire Trump made was an individual as undistinguished, obscure, and frankly weird as Carter Page: George Papadopoulos. But Papadopoulos and Page had something in common: like Page, Papadopoulos had already been secretly contacted by Kremlin agents, a fact he informed Donald Trump of the very first time he met him.

Papadopoulos, an energy-sector analyst like Page, in fact had so little basis to be on a presidential national security advisory team that from the moment he was brought on board by the Trump campaign he billed himself in private conversations, unabashedly, as the man with a secret backchannel to the Russian Ministry of Affairs that Trump and his team could readily exploit. In the one and only meeting of the NSAC in late March of 2016, Trump responded approvingly to Papadopoulos’ suggestion that this backchannel be liberally employed by Trump and his political operation. (The other main takeaway from the meeting, per attendee—and Sessions aide—J.D. Gordon was that Trump wanted the Republican platform on Ukraine changed as soon as possible. Recall here that Kremlin agent and Ukraine expert Paul Manafort had joined Trump’s campaign as a top adviser just days earlier, though tellingly he was not included in the NSAC photo that would ultimately be shot on that date for American media’s benefit.)

The fourth hire to the NSAC was the aforementioned Sessions aide Gordon, whose pro-Kremlin, anti-Ukraine work on the NSAC will be discussed in more detail below.

While as many as twelve other individuals would at some point be associated with the NSAC, all—with just two exceptions—would say that they essentially did no work for Trump following their hire, suggesting that their presence on the NSAC was merely window-dressing: an attempt to make the NSAC look like a real advisory committee, rather than (a) a sop to U.S. media, and (b) a short bench of individuals Trump and his team could select from among for clandestine pro-Kremlin work. Needless to say, only the most obscure and least distinguished NSAC members were allowed to occupy such latter roles; anyone on the NSAC who in fact had any business being there would have been too likely, one assumes, to refuse such potentially reputation-killing assignments.

The two exceptions to this were Walid Phares, a virulently anti-Muslim far-right activist who had at least one strange meeting with a Kremlin agent during the 2016 campaign, and Keith Kellogg, who would follow Mike Flynn as Trump’s National Security Advisor (if this gives an indication of the expectations Trump had for him).

The brief history above begs a question, however. If the NSAC was largely, with only a few exceptions, a sham operation that was neither a real group nor actually advising Trump, who was actually running Trump’s foreign policy and national security shops? And why was it so important for Trump to obscure the real role(s) of such individuals?

This is where four men in particular come most vividly into play: the aforementioned Manafort, Flynn, and Simes, and a man by the name of Richard Burt.

If you want to understand how then-candidate Trump waged war on Ukraine even prior to his presidency, you have to understand that Trump’s actual foreign policy and national security advisers during the 2016 presidential election were these four men—aided, on occasion, by the first four hires Trump made to the NSAC (before a bevy of men with more respectability and scruples were brought in to round out its numbers).

Like Page and Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn can best be identified, as of his ascension to the role of Trump adviser in mid-2015, as a weirdo with a Kremlin fetish. During a brief stint as the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Flynn had so vociferously argued for greater collaboration with Russian intelligence that it alarmed his superiors—and contributed to President Obama making Flynn the topic of one of the two dire warnings he gave Trump during their presidential-transition meeting in November 2016 (besides telling Trump to under no circumstances hire Flynn, Obama told Trump that his gravest national security threat would come from Kim Jong-Un, the sociopath running North Korea, a man Trump soon thereafter sought to befriend). It’s unsettling that in late 2016 the then–leader of the free world was most concerned—speaking to his successor—about a thug allied with China and Russia and a second man Trump moved quickly to hire to help oversee America’s most sensitive intelligence operations.

So why did Trump first summon Flynn to Trump Tower in August 2015 to bring him inside his inner circle? And why, for that matter, would Trump later lie about who had initiated the first contact between Trump’s camp and Flynn’s (Trump would falsely say Flynn initiated contact, but it has since been confirmed that Trump himself did)? Why did Trump never name Flynn to his NSAC, even as he was taking Flynn’s advice—and not the NSAC’s—on Russia? One possible reason for all of this relates to what Flynn was up to domestically and internationally at the time Trump made him his foremost (but unofficial and unannounced) national security adviser: forging a secret agreement among several nations variously hostile to the United States which, if signed onto by a U.S. president, would result in an end to all sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine in February 2014. {Note: This is discussed in more detail in Proof of Conspiracy, but at the heart of this deal was an arrangement to have state-owned Russian firms build new nuclear reactors across the Middle East as a way to prepare for the drying up of Middle Eastern oil.}

Flynn’s 2015 travels had taken him to Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Russia as part of the multinational energy-sector plot alluded to above and exhaustively chronicled in Proof of Conspiracy (2019). Trump was well aware of Flynn’s views on what Russian energy (and goodwill) could mean for private investors and, as or more importantly, for Trump’s own ability to please the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, two countries in which Trump desperately wanted to do business—and from whom he desperately wanted to extract future investments in the Trump Organization. Owing to an early 2010s agreement between the crown prince of the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed, and Vladimir Putin—in the form of Russia’s Russian Direct Investment Fund—the UAE was now inextricably entwined, as to its foreign investments, with Russia. (It had long been entwined in this way with the Saudis, as “MBZ” and the new Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman or “MBS”, spoke almost every day.) If Flynn’s energy-sector plan sought to enrich Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE at the expense of Ukraine, which it most certainly did, it also presented Trump with an opportunity to, in pleasing Putin, please MBZ and MBS and open up new streams of foreign investment for the Trump Organization (particularly as to its golf courses, which—per Eric Trump—had previously been funded by Russian banks but were faring so poorly Trump knew he would need new investments streams; Proof of Conspiracy details how wrapped up with Saudi and Emirati investors Trump now is).

When Paul Manafort went to Trump friend Thomas Barrack in February 2016 to seek the latter’s help in “getting to” then–candidate Trump, Barrack was about to become involved in Flynn’s multinational “grand bargain”—not surprising, given Barrack’s extraordinary closeness with the Emirati royal family. As Manafort and Barrack then worked together to formulate the former’s “pitch” to Trump (the document produced by which collaboration has since been made public), they focused on two components in particular: (a) that Manafort would happily work for “free” (a premise Trump could not possibly have credited, as he’d personally retained Manafort as a consultant in the past and knew how expensive his services were), and (b) that Manafort had a history of navigating the complicated geopolitics of Russia and Ukraine through his work as the chief adviser for Kremlin puppet Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv. In short, the Manafort-Barrack axis was a natural extension of the clandestine multilateral dealings Trump may already have been familiar with from his many months of working alongside the Russophile Flynn.

Major-media reports suggest that one of the biggest proponents of Manafort being brought aboard the Trump campaign in March 2016 was Jared Kushner, who by that month had come to be advised on foreign policy matters by three men in particular: Yousef al-Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to the United States; Dimitri Simes, the “friend” of Putin who was head of the pro-Kremlin Center for the National Interest in Washington (and who, during the pendency of the Mueller investigation, would flee the United States, move to Russia, and take a job working for the Kremlin); and Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States. Kushner, a political neophyte, was under the sway of these men—all of whom were linked to countries involved in Flynn’s “grand bargain.”

Kushner wasn’t wooed by Manafort, Barrack, al-Otaiba, Simes, and Dermer through promises of energy-sector riches, however, but an ambition far more personal to the historically left-leaning Kushner: peace between Israel and its Muslim neighbors.

Indeed, perhaps the most surprising component of Flynn’s foreign wheeling and dealing was that it carried with it the possibility of a public detente (there had already been something of a private one) between Israel and the Saudi-Emirati axis. Flynn’s grand bargain would usher in a new era of cooperation between the Israelis, Saudis, and Emiratis, with both a normalization of diplomatic relations and the transfer of valuable military-grade surveillance technology from Israel to the autocrats MBS and MBZ (who were keen to even more efficiently surveil and track their own citizens).

Kushner was made to understand that, with the aid of Flynn, Barrack, and Manafort, his father-in-law would be in a position to not only make a large number of people very rich but to secure for Israel—a country in which the Kushners had always been profoundly invested, not just because of their Judaism but their longstanding close relationship with Israel’s then-leader, Benjamin Netanyahu—a degree of peace and security it had never before known.

The peace and security of Ukraine meant absolutely nothing to any of these men.

Indeed, it meant less than nothing—as it stood in the way of their ambitions. For all they cared, Ukraine could fall into the Black Sea. While Flynn’s grand bargain did include a minor bribe for Ukraine (a side deal involving Ukraine’s state-owned energy concern, Turboatom), not only would this minor deal almost certainly have further enriched Putin, who had myriad ways to extract value from Ukraine’s energy sector, but financially speaking was a mere pittance compared to what the other players in the deal were getting. Besides which, it was not anticipated that any deal involving Turboatom would be the tipping-point for getting Ukraine to publicly agreed to the bargain; rather, it was Trump who—if he became President of the United States— would be a position to compel Ukraine’s compliance with the deal by making policy decisions in Washington like (for example) the withholding of military aid to Ukraine.

Indeed, on the matter of the Russia-Ukraine War the “grand bargain” did more than merely remove all sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine; certain versions of the deal would have blessed Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and allowed Russia to annex Ukraine’s Donbas, gifting to Russia about 7% of Ukraine’s land area in total.

In short, the “sucker” in the grand bargain was intended to be Ukraine—not merely because no one involved in the bargain (including Trump) cared about Ukraine’s fate, but because many of those involved in the exchange (including Trump and, of course, Putin) felt a profound contempt for Ukraine and wanted it harmed in any way possible.

In view of the foregoing, it should be little surprise that just a matter of days after Manafort’s hiring; just a matter of days after the first and only meeting of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee; in the midst of clandestine contacts between members of that Committee and the Russians and Israelis (most notably in the person of George Papadopoulos); and in the midst of Jared Kushner developing closer and closer relations with his foreign-national advisers from Russia, Israel, and the UAE; it was announced that Trump would formally outline his planned foreign policy agenda at a large public event at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on April 27, 2016.

Trump’s Mayflower speech was scheduled by Kushner; hosted by Simes; orchestrated (as to its logistics) by Manafort; advised by Flynn and Barrack, the latter of whom was in regular contact with al-Otaiba; and edited by Papadopoulos. The speech’s content was, frankly, shocking: just 24 months after Russia had committed the war crime of unilaterally and without provocation invading Europe, Trump proposed a no-strings-attached friendship with the Kremlin that no man or woman in D.C. at the time could have argued would be in America’s national interest. No mention was made of Flynn’s (and Putin’s, and Barrack’s, and Manafort’s, and Kushner’s, and Dermer’s, and Simes’, and al-Otaiba’s) grand bargain, and in a speech billed as Trump’s “first foreign policy address” no mention was made of Ukraine at all. Russia, meanwhile, was mentioned six times; Israel, five times; and Saudi Arabia once (but Trump also spoke at great length about ISIS and Iran in ways that would have enormously pleased the Saudis and the Emiratis). While Trump did mention NATO three times, he did so only to attack its members in grotesque fashion, even threatening to withdraw immediately from the mutual-defense alliance if his petulant demands weren’t met. He called the “mission” of NATO “outdated”, noting that it had “grown out of the Cold War” and was essentially irrelevant in view of the preferability of establishing a friendship with Russia—a country which, again, had invaded Europe approximately 24 months earlier.

It was a speech Putin himself could have delivered, indeed written, and as it turns out that’s almost exactly what happened.

The Mayflower Speech

Trump had almost no role whatsoever in drafting his own foreign policy. As an initial matter, the document was created by Manafort, Papadopoulos, Simes, and a man on the advisory board of a Russian bank (Alfa Bank) that was “pinging” Trump Tower’s servers furiously at the time for no reason anyone has ever been able to determine: Richard Burt. Papadopoulos brought to the table a somewhat deep understanding of energy issues in Europe and the Middle East; Simes, a profound awareness of using rhetoric to draw the United States closer to Russia (something he’d spent his whole career doing, and as noted above he now works as a professional propagandist for the Kremlin); Manafort, an intimate familiarity with the contours of the Russia-Ukraine conflict; and Burt, a specialization in the financial implications of all of the foregoing.

Additional input into the speech was offered to Jared Kushner, who knew nothing about foreign policy, and Yousef al-Otaiba, a foreign national with no allegiance at all to the national interests of the United States (of which the same could be said, of course, of Simes, and in a de facto sense the avaricious Manafort, who owed a great deal of money to Putin proxy Oleg Deripaska and was reportedly—according to his own daughter—close to the point of suicide over the implications of being in debt to a man as dangerous as Deripaska). Papadopoulos had been in regular contact with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the secret backchannel green-lit by Trump himself in late March, after which Papadopoulos (who had worked alongside Flynn on an abortive Ben Carson presidential campaign) immediately disappeared on a trip to another “grand bargain” country, Israel, during which trip—reports would indicate—he met a man from Israeli intelligence. At the edges of the speechwriting effort were the Emirati ally Barrack; the grand-bargainer himself, Flynn; and erstwhile Trump toady Sessions, who would thereafter perjure himself before Congress over his secret contacts with the Russians (and face no consequences whatsoever for doing so).

It would be impossible to delve fully into, in this space, all the obscure motives and ambitions of the men who wrote Trump’s foreign policy for him, especially those of Manafort and the man Putin called a “friend” at a public event in Russia (Simes), but it is worth noting that at the time he self-admittedly helped write Trump’s pro-Kremlin foreign policy Burt was a paid consultant lobbying on behalf of a Kremlin-backed gas pipeline that would stretch from Russia to Europe “while bypassing Ukraine…extending Putin’s leverage over Europe” and costing Ukraine untold billions in lost transshipment revenue. Trump’s speech would be attended by Iran-Contra criminal Bud McFarlane, who like Burt was advocating for new Russian energy solutions, was seeking private meetings with Trump’s team, and seemed to be enjoying the largesse of shadowy figures in the Middle East—as he showed up to Trump’s speech (as video footage confirms) holding a gilded curved sword he’d apparently just gotten as a gift. Manafort and Simes had arranged for four foreign ambassadors to attend the private party at the Center for the National Interest just prior to Trump’s address, all from nations key to Russian energy interests (Russia, Singapore, Italy, and the Philippines).

Trump’s speech, which inexplicably had little to do with U.S. national interests and even less to do with the national interests of the foremost U.S. ally then engaged in a hot ground war (Ukraine), was a failure on all fronts. Experts gave it, reported Politico, “a failing grade for coherence”, and it “drew snickering and scorn” from those in Washington who—unlike the men who’d worked on Trump’s speech—had an expert understanding of U.S. foreign policy from the American perspective rather than from the capitals of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates.

But Donald Trump wasn’t done putting the hurt on Ukraine in 2016. In fact, he was just getting started.

Because Trump’s now-infamous Mayflower speech was timed to coincide with his unofficial emergence as the prohibitive favorite to win the 2016 GOP presidential primaries, it also marked the beginning of furious preparations inside Team Trump for the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland—an event Manafort had ostensibly been hired to help Trump prepare for, but which had come to represent only a small component of Manafort’s campaign duties after he (and his subsequently indicted deputy, Rick Gates) took control of the entire 2016 Trump campaign within a matter of days of joining its staff. Still, because Manafort’s political specialty was, in point of fact, apart from advising corrupt Kremlin agents in Kyiv, domestic political conventions in the United States, he naturally took the lead in guiding Trump toward a gathering in the Midwest at which Trump would need to do two things: (1) keep Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) from staging an intra-party rebellion to try to steal the nomination from Trump, and (2) realign the Republican Party platform to conform to the foreign policy agenda which—quite literally—a bevy of Kremlin agents had written for him.

The 2016 Republican National Convention

What subsequently happened in Cleveland constituted Donald Trump’s second public aggression against Ukraine, and the most serious overall to date. Notably, as with every other such major or minor attack—those that preceded the summer of 2016 and those that followed it—everyone involved in this Trumpist assault on Ukraine would subsequently lie about their role in it. Along with everything else about each of these incidents, the apparent prerequisite for all involved to lie about their intentions and actions suggests that they knew they weren’t doing the work of the American people.

Manafort, in particular, spent the days and weeks leading up to the 2016 Republican National Convention in a telling sequence of clandestine activities, sending messages to Putin proxy Oleg Deripaska through his old Kyiv compatriot Konstantin Kilimnik, a member of Russian foreign intelligence. Meanwhile, Papadopoulos remained in contact with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Carter Page made a mysterious trip to a city that hosts the headquarters of Russian intelligence in Europe (Budapest)—during which trip he later implied he may have met an unnamed Russian national—and Jeff Sessions stayed in contact with the Russian ambassador who had earlier met secretly with Michael Flynn, Sergey Kislyak. And of course as these secret meetings and communications were ongoing, Kremlin-backed hackers were attacking America.

The first attacks by the “Cozy Bear” Kremlin-backed unit began shortly after Trump announced his candidacy for president—during the window of time he appeared in Las Vegas to tell Kremlin spy Maria Butina on camera that Russia could take what it wanted in Ukraine without consequence.

The first attacks by the “Fancy Bear” Kremlin-backed unit began during the window of time (April 2016) Trump declared his pro-Kremlin foreign policy at the Mayflower.

The coordinated Kremlin hack of the Democratic Party became common knowledge in the summer of 2016, prompting only one response by Donald Trump: that he hoped the attacks would continue in such a way that they’d turn up documents stolen from Clinton. The next day, new attacks were launched by the Kremlin that sought precisely the data Trump had publicly requested.

It was in the context of these events—after the first two, and mere days before the third—that Team Trump descended on Cleveland to try to orchestrate what Putin wanted most from a Trump presidency: free rein in Ukraine, including the ability to invade that country a second time and face minimal resistance from Ukrainian troops.

For the way to Kyiv to be made clear for Putin, Putin needed one thing in particular: an assurance that the United States would not send weapons to Ukraine, as U.S. arms could stop (and indeed right now, in March 2022, are stopping) a Russian offensive aimed at seizing and sacking Kyiv and replacing Ukraine’s democratically elected government with another one like the puppet regime Manafort had advised for years.

So what did Manafort, by then Trump’s campaign manager, do in Cleveland? At a time he was meeting with Russian intelligence, living in the same building as Trump, and speaking with Trump several times daily—Manafort’s daughter says the two men were “thick as thieves”—Manafort sought to alter the Republican Party platform to remove any reference to America providing lethal weaponry to Ukraine. For this effort he enlisted the deputy head of Trump’s NSAC, the aforementioned Sessions aide Gordon.

Gordon’s job was to strongarm rank-and-file GOP electors into adopting a significant change to the party’s platform that they neither understood nor supported. Following Gordon’s successful orchestration of the GOP categorically withdrawing support for military aid to Ukraine well away from the glare of RNC cameras—the fateful meeting happened before the convention had even begun—he lied to media about it, Manafort lied to media about it, and Trump lied about it. All three men claimed to have no idea why the change was made or who had ordered it, though in fact all knew that Trump had ordered it months ago, at the very first meeting of his NSAC back in late March.

Fortunately, just prior to word filtering down through the Trump campaign that the resolution on Ukraine was not to be spoken of by anyone, Gordon accidentally gave an interview in which he acknowledged that he had been on the phone with “Trump Tower” while aggressively pushing RNC members to adopt the platform change on Ukraine, and that the order for it had (a) come from the Tower, (b) involved Manafort, and (c) been first communicated to him and the rest of the NSAC by Trump in March.

Thus was the position of one of America’s major political parties on Ukraine altered—at a time when the U.S. ally was fending off attacks sponsored by the second-largest military in the world.

Days later, Manafort would secretly transfer a tranche of proprietary Trump campaign polling data to Russian intelligence following a meeting at a location just a few blocks from Trump Tower.

And Trump would spend the next three years trying to make sure Manafort never told the feds what Trump knew about any of this. In fact, Trump’s need to keep Manafort quiet was so vital to his own interests that he’d ultimately be impeached by the House for a course of conduct specifically designed to keep what Paul Manafort knew a secret.

2017: Trump Launches His Third Attack on Ukraine

Everything Old—Like Trumpist Conspiracy Theories—Is New Again

Most Americans probably don’t realize that Donald Trump ultimately filed a lawsuit over the Mueller investigation, a stunning piece of fiction in which accuses Clinton of being personally involved in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy to steal the 2016 presidential election. That’s right, the 2016 presidential election—which not only did Trump win, but which featured almost no discussion of Trump-Russia collusion at all (the topic didn’t become a significant focus of public discourse until January of 2017).

The reason most Americans probably don’t realize Trump filed a lawsuit alleging a criminal conspiracy to “rig” the 2016 election is because the suit was filed this week.

Indeed, Trump filed his lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others on March 24, 2022.

While the mere fact of this lawsuit is generally insignificant—Trump’s cause of action is doomed, and will be lucky to survive summary judgment—the fact that he’s chosen this moment to resuscitate his claims of a rigged 2016 presidential election couldn’t be more significant. Why? Because the entity Trump has always claimed Hillary Clinton conspired with during the 2016 election is the nation of Ukraine.

By filing this lawsuit even as Russia is committing heinous war crimes across Ukraine, Trump is electing to resurrect a conspiracy theory born in the late summer of 2016 and devised by none other than Kremlin agent Paul Manafort—a theory Trump knows is false and knows endangers the Ukrainians in myriad ways.

The Fall of Paul Manafort

As those who have followed Manafort’s professional career will be aware, the politico was “fired” in August 2016 when the heat over his past dealings with the Russians and Ukrainians—dealings that had been the very basis for Trump hiring him in the first place—became too much for Trump and the rest of his political team to handle. I put “fired” in quotes here because in fact Manafort wasn’t fired at all; like his old pal and consulting-business associate Roger Stone, the longtime Trump consultant Manafort was merely publicly separated from Trump’s campaign. In secret, Trump continued getting advice from both Manafort (separated in Summer 2016) and Stone (separated in Summer 2015) just as he had before. The primary change occasioned by Manafort’s public embarrassment was that Thomas Barrack, the Trump friend who had helped Manafort get hired and who was at the time heavily invested in Flynn’s grand bargain, had to orchestrate a secret payment of millions of dollars to Manafort that seemed to many, in retrospect, like an attempt to purchase Manafort’s silence about what Trump knew—doing so at a time when Manafort’s anger at being publicly humiliated might have led him to do something rash, like speak to U.S. media or federal investigators.

One reason that Trump needed to keep Manafort very close to the campaign—before the latter’s indictment, that is; after his indictment, it was only too clear why Trump kept speaking secretly to him by phone on a regular basis—was that as the summer of 2016 wore on, it became increasingly obvious that (a) some of the blowback from the Kremlin’s hacking campaign against the DNC and Hillary Clinton might fall upon the Trump campaign (for many reasons, among them the fact that Trump had publicly endorsed the Kremlin’s attacks), and (b) the ailing Trump political machine needed the sort of shot in the arm poll-wise that could only come from the machine’s agents (or agents of their agents) procuring new dirt on Clinton from the very Russians Trump wanted to publicly remain disassociated from. It was a catch-22 that Trump resolved by ordering Flynn, Manafort, Stone, and Steve Bannon to go get him the materials stolen from Clinton by whatever means necessary. Flynn enlisted the aid of some of his most unscrupulous friends, including Ginni Thomas bestie Barbara Ledeen and a GOP donor (Peter Smith) who later died suddenly under suspicious circumstances, to try to track down the stolen goods. Everyone involved knew the task would require making contact with Russian criminals, and no one seemed to have any concern over this other than that Trump maintain plausible deniability over an operation he had directly ordered on repeated occasions in the summer of 2016—well after he knew that Putin was waging a cyberwar on America’s electoral infrastructure and political arena.

But in the late summer of 2016, Paul Manafort presented Trump with an alternative to a scheme Manafort must have known—better than anyone else—was fruitless, given that the Russians did not, in fact, have possession of the documents Trump wanted (though Kremlin cutout WikiLeaks did have some useful information about the DNC that it planned to leak; it was during this period that WikiLeaks sent Trump’s son Don a password to access this material, and made contact with off-the-books Trump agent Stone). What if, Manafort proposed, Trump and his campaign simply came out and said that Russia hadn’t been responsible for any attacks on the U.S.? What if, he further advised, Trump and his team declared that individuals in Ukraine were then working with the Democratic Party to try to rig the 2016 presidential election against Trump?

It was an audacious, and of course entirely groundless, conspiracy theory. But it had the advantage of exculpating and thereby pleasing the Kremlin; attacking Ukraine, a nation for which both Trump and Manafort had only contempt; falsely alleging deep corruption within the Democratic Party and 2016 Clinton campaign at a time when the campaign manager for the 2016 Trump campaign (Manafort himself) was secretly colluding with Russian intelligence; and producing such chaos inside the media that it would soften the blow of September or October “surprises” on the Russian hacking front that could damage Trump’s chances of election. (And indeed, just such a surprise came in October, when David Corn of Mother Jones reported on the so-called “Steele dossier”; fortunately, in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Corn’s reporting the Trump campaign was able to get the FBI to falsely tell the New York Times that there was no evidence Trump had any secret ties to Russia—though he did—and to convince FBI director James Comey, in part through public and private threats made by Giuliani and Trump lawyer Joe diGenova, to reopen a probe of Clinton’s private email server.)

Because the lies told to the New York Times by the FBI, and the FBI’s unconscionable decision to interfere in the 2016 presidential election by reopening a case it had long ago closed—a reopening occasioned by the FBI’s own failure (apparently a deliberate one) to process evidence in its possession that turned out to be insignificant—made the possibility of Trump-Russia collusion virtually a non-issue prior to the election, it was never necessary for Trump to employ Manafort’s implicitly Kremlin-endorsed “blame Ukraine” conspiracy theory in 2016.

But while that may have been how things stood in 2016, the same wasn’t true in 2017.

In January 2017, Steele’s dossier of raw intel—which the curator himself had said was likely 30% incorrect (a typical percentage for raw intel on a hot-button issue arising in a country in which intelligence is hard to glean)—was published by BuzzFeed News, which enraged Trump in significant part because it appeared then, and still does today, that approximately 70% of the dossier was broadly accurate, just as Steele had predicted. {Note: See the Proof trilogy for exhaustively sourced confirmation of this claim.}

Some of Trump and Manafort’s most substantive secret phone calls occurred shortly after the release of the Steele dossier, which featured the names and activities of both men, and largely in an accurate way that would’ve unnerved both: Manafort was said to have taken the lead in colluding with the Russians (as he had), and Trump was said to have secretly sought private enrichment through side deals involving the Russians (he had). Michael Cohen was said to have taken the lead in advancing the side deals Trump sought—he had, though the dossier got one or two details of his effort wrong, as its author had predicted would be inevitable—and Trump was also said to have used members of his advisory corps to hold secret meetings with Kremlin agents (which indeed he had, in the persons of Flynn, Papadopoulos, Page, Stone, Manafort, Gates, Sessions, Cohen, and a cast of lesser-known characters who were associates of these top Trump advisers). It’s no wonder, then, that Trump’s months-long course of Obstruction of Justice—painstakingly detailed by the special counsel for the DOJ, Robert Mueller, before being swept under the rug by Trump’s handpicked AG, Bill Barr (who had gotten his job in part with a letter in which he prejudged the Mueller investigation as being without merit)—began with the publication of Steele’s dossier.

And so it was that, not long after the recusal of Sessions from the Russia investigation in the spring of 2017, and the launch of the Mueller investigation that summer, and at a time Trump was still in contact with Manafort—and Manafort in steady text contact with Trump domestic policy adviser Sean Hannity—that Team Trump resuscitated a plot first proposed to it by the Kremlin agent (soon to be federal defendant) Manafort: falsely blame Ukraine for everything the agents of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin had done.

Ukraine: The Enemy of Trump’s America

What Trump wanted out of the 2016 conspiracy theory he spread throughout 2017 and just resurrected this week is nothing less than the most spectacular overnight shift in U.S. foreign policy in modern American political history: for Americans to decide, en masse, that not only is one of our key European allies in fact secretly one of our biggest adversaries, but that the country Trump’s own party believed to be America’s biggest adversary up until the moment of the 2016 RNC is in fact merely a victim of the most audacious political plot ever conceived: an election-interference-faking criminal cabal encompassing every U.S. intelligence agency, the whole of the Democratic Party, and all seven of the allied intelligence agencies that began reporting to U.S. intelligence in 2015 that Trump agents were building clandestine relationships with Kremlin agents.

The plot Trump alleged in 2017, and now alleges again, would’ve had to include, too, the FBI, the DOJ, and the U.S. State Department. Indeed, it is difficult to identify any subsector of the federal government that would not have to be replete with the most insidious forms of corruption for even a fraction of the Trump-Manafort conspiracy theory about the 2016 election to be true. Indeed, Kremlin agents could draft no more comprehensive attack on the U.S. government than the one first proposed by Kremlin agent Manfort in 2016 and wheeled about America by Trump himself throughout 2017.

The chief beneficiaries of Team Trump’s Manafort-directed response to the Mueller probe were, of course, Trump and Putin; then, secondarily, Russian intelligence and Paul Manafort—the latter of whom feared (it turned out correctly) that the Mueller probe would eventually lead to both his prosecution and imprisonment in the United States and his further investigation and prosecution in Ukraine (in which latter fear he was only partly correct, as we will see below). That January 2017 also saw Trump’s friend, fixer, and attorney Michael Cohen secretly ferrying at least one self-described “peace deal” from a Kremlin agent in Ukraine to the desk of Michael Flynn, with the aim that the deal (essentially a dramatic surrender to Russia by Ukraine) shortly land on the desk of now-President Trump, also suggests that Manafort’s “blame Ukraine” scheme was intended to help pave the way for an end to U.S. sanctions on Russia and a permissive stance by Trump toward Putin doing whatever he wanted with Ukraine.

If Trump and his team could convince Republican elected officials and “base” voters that Ukraine was their true enemy—tossing in the sweetener that the premise carried with it allegations of historic corruption against the Democratic Party—what would stop them from supporting what Trump and Putin wanted to see happen in Ukraine, including an end to U.S. military aid, Russian annexation of the Donbas region, and the cessation of all sanctions on Russia not just for the Ukrainian invasion but (now) the 2016 attack on America’s election? Turning Ukraine into a bogeyman solved all of Trump’s problems at once, while promising to turn America’s attention from his own, Steele- and Mueller-revealed corruption to alleged corruption by his most despised political opponents.

It was, in fact, the exact same ploy Trump would eventually try to execute in 2020—once again involving the Democratic candidate for president, false allegations of corruption, a false scapegoating of Ukraine, and a desire to profit from energy-sector deals originating in Moscow. But before Trump could turn his attentions to the 2020 election, he needed to ensure that (a) Manafort would not talk to federal investigators in the United States, and (b) all investigations of Manafort in Ukraine would cease. It would be impossible for him to scapegoat Ukraine for the inalterable fact of Russia being in the midst of a “hot” cyberwar against the United States if evidence emerged—either from Manafort’s lips or from a full Ukrainian review of Manafort’s financial dealings there—confirming that while Manafort may have been working in Ukraine pre-2015, he was doing so as a Kremlin agent, and that while he may have taken a job with Trump “for free,” he was in fact continuing his lucrative service to the Kremlin.

Trump even had reason to fear that his old friend and associate Manafort would tell the feds, or investigators in Ukraine, that he—Trump—had known about all of it from the start. Certainly, the mere fact of Trump agreeing to blame the 2016 DNC hacks on the Ukrainians when his briefings, public evidence, intelligence reports, and even his own directives to subordinates and public statements in mid-2016 confirmed he knew that Russia had been behind everything indicates that he was willing to conspire with Manafort, at a minimum after-the-fact, to defend Putin and Russia and attack Ukraine.

{Note: While Proof of Corruption goes into exhaustive detail about the conspiracy theory Trump, Manafort, and Trump’s allies spent 2017 and much of 2018 spreading, I do not wish to here repeat that theory in any detail—or the myriad and fully sourced debunkings of each component of it that appear in that book—as to do so would be to spread odious Kremlin disinformation farther than it has already spread. Having said this, it should be understood that, as independent journalists are now exploring, there is every reason to believe that the Hunter Biden laptop that suspiciously fell into Team Trump’s hands indeed did so through the auspices of Russian nationals and pro-Kremlin Ukrainians. To the extent the contents of the laptop are known and have been authenticated, they appear to largely confirm what has been known for years: Hunter Biden is a recovering drug addict who has engaged in unscrupulous business dealings that were not illegal and did not involve his father, but which were primed to be deployed by enemies of his father—including the Kremlin, its agents, and Donald Trump. For more on how Donald Trump personally directed a vile domestic disinformation campaign on this subject throughout 2017 and 2018, see the text of the 2020 book Proof of Corruption.}

2018: Trump Launches His Fourth Attack on Ukraine

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko Enters the Field of Play

The two lies Trump most commonly tells about his relationship with Ukraine are these: (1) the notable components of his relationship with that nation exclusively consist of a single call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in mid-2019, and (2) unlike his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, he made his support for Ukraine evident by “giving” the Ukrainians Javelin anti-tank missiles (a falsehood usually accompanied by the equally false claim that all President Obama ever did for the Ukrainians was give them “blankets”).

These two lies are most easily dispelled by considering the adversarial relationship Trump had with Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko—neither the worst of the six presidents Ukraine has had thus far nor the best. While the United States held out hope, early in Poroshenko’s tenure, that he would be an anti-corruption reformer, and while there were some early indications that Poroshenko was indeed inclined in this direction, the latter half of Poroshenko’s five-year tenure as Ukraine’s president (2014 to 2019, from the period of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to Zelensky’s election) saw some backsliding on the public-corruption front. Poroshenko is perhaps best likened, in Western terms, to American president Ulysses S. Grant; he may have wanted to battle corruption in government, but the commitment of those he surrounded himself with was so dissimilar, and his will to do anything about it so limited, that the result was governance much more corrupt than its leader could rightly be said to have been.

In fairness to Poroshenko, a few distinctions between him and most U.S. presidents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must be made. First and most importantly, Ukraine was at war for the entirety of Poroshenko’s tenure; not only had the world’s second-strongest military just illegally annexed a significant percentage of Ukraine’s land area, but Putin’s agents in Ukraine were waging an all-out revolution in eastern Ukraine. With a portion of the nation having been stolen and and another portion in open revolt—and with the author of both tragedies being a neighboring country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and its arm deep inside Ukraine’s lucrative energy market—it can easily be understood that while fighting corruption (particularly that subset of corruption linked to pro-Kremlin politicians and officials inside Ukraine) was a top priority for President Poroshenko, it was by no means his exclusive priority.

But Poroshenko also had a second reason for struggling to fight domestic corruption: the simple fact that he was only the fifth president in the history of his country, and that the current iteration of his nation was, at the time of his ascension to leadership, only 23 years old. By way of comparison, Poroshenko assumed the role of Ukraine’s commander-in-chief as early in its lifespan as James Madison did in U.S. history; and just as the U.S. was mired in the War of 1812 in the twenty-third year following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution—a war with a much larger power from which the current version of the U.S. had originated—in 2014 Poroshenko led a nation at war with its own former ruler, Russia, while lacking the geopolitical maturity to have fully escaped the systemic corruption its historic relationship with Russia had baked into it across nearly eight decades.

In short, Petro Poroshenko’s two foremost concerns during his presidency were these: (1) securing military-assistance commitments from the United States to help Ukraine beat back ongoing Putin-sponsored domestic rebellion (and prepare for the inevitable second Russian invasion in the future), and (2) achieving a level of institutional stability Ukraine had never yet witnessed in its brief history, a task which Poroshenko (like any politician) may have associated with his own reelection. And lest it seem a bit morally paltry for a politician to associate the health of his country with his own political prospects, recall that it was a revolution (the 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution) that had made Poroshenko’s election possible, and that during this revolution the preceding Ukrainian president, a Kremlin puppet, had literally been chased from Kyiv. Perhaps we can understand, then, why Poroshenko might have associated, for reasons beyond the venal, his own ability to have a long and stable presidential term with the capacity of Ukraine to achieve its own political equilibrium.

Yet from the outset of his presidency—which began years into Petro Poroshenko’s term—Donald Trump made it his task to imperil both of the Ukrainian president’s priorities. And moreover, he sought to threaten what arguably was Poroshenko’s third priority, fighting corruption, by introducing to U.S.-Ukrainian relations precisely the sort of Kremlin-style graft that American diplomats in Ukraine’s capital (led by then–U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch) were desperately seeking to beat back.

The Russia-Ukraine War

Before we consider in greater detail Trump’s aggressions against the Ukrainians in 2017, we must recall that Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia had already killed about 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers by the time Trump became president—a three-year total, to put it in perspective, about two-thirds the death toll of the decade-long Soviet-Afghan War, or half the number of U.S. draftees killed in the nine years of the Vietnam War.

Understand, too, that at the time of Trump’s election the United States was by no means neutral in the Russia-Ukraine War. On the day of Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, America was unambiguously an ally of Ukraine and a geopolitical adversary of Russia—and indeed was expressing its allyship with Ukraine by orchestrating a large and persistent pipeline of valuable goods between the two countries.

Simply put, as Donald Trump sat down behind the Resolute Desk as President of the United States for the first time, the country he now led was in the midst of aiding a European ally to hold its own in a war against the world’s second-strongest military.

And the newly minted President Trump immediately sought to end that alliance.

Trump inherited an agreement by the Pentagon to send a large number of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine on a recurring basis, Javelin missiles being in 2017—and still today—the single most important weapon Ukraine has in trying to fend off Putin’s illegal unilateral military aggression. In any briefing of U.S.-Ukraine relations, including his first one, Trump would have been fully apprised not only of the hot war then ongoing between Ukraine and Russia, but America’s absolutely critical role in that conflict.

So how did Trump respond to this intelligence in the first year of his presidency? He told his advisors that he wanted all military aid to Ukraine to stop.

Needless to say, this stunning position—the proposed abandonment of an ally and potential future NATO country in the midst of a war on its soil in no way of its own making—was consistent with the position Trump had taken, and his political team had mercilessly lied about, less than a year earlier, at the 2016 RNC in Cleveland. So by mid-2017, Trump was not only well aware of the historically idiosyncratic nature of his position on Ukraine but also the need to systematically and with brutal persistence lie to American media and American voters about his intentions and the sordid, venal reasoning that we now know lay behind them.

The Javelins

When Trump first blocked Javelin sales to Ukraine, he didn’t do so the way a POTUS acting ethically and within the legal confines of his office would’ve done: by publicly announcing a foreign policy shift on a matter of national security, and explaining his basis for doing so to voters. And surely, the United States exiting its critical role in an ongoing war in Europe—one that was seeing America’s foremost geopolitical foe (per the Republicans’ 2012 presidential nominee) invade Europe without provocation, itself a crime under international law—was precisely the sort of seismic shift in American foreign policy that would’ve warranted not just a public declaration but perhaps even an address to the nation about a new detente with Putin and Russia that would let the Kremlin take just about as much of Europe’s largest nation by land area as it desired.

What actually happened, of course, is that Pentagon procurement officials awoke one day to find that Mick Mulvaney of the Office of Management and Budget—a pencil-pushing bureaucrat with no understanding of foreign policy or national security but who, it must be said not coincidentally, would shortly become Trump’s chief of staff—had frozen the next anticipated shipment of U.S. Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine.

The Pentagon was blindsided. What the hell was going on? Was this some kind of tragic bureaucratic error? Surely the United States wouldn’t knowingly pull aid from a key European ally just as it was in the midst of a major military conflict—especially a conflict with the very nation that had only the year before launched an unrelenting cyberwar against the United States itself (and was currently under U.S. sanctions)?

The notion that the OMB, a government unit that traditionally held no active role in military procurements or shipments, would interject to reverse U.S. policy was—well, to call it unthinkable would be an understatement. Yet when the Pentagon urgently queried OMB, it could get no coherent response about who had ordered the block on military aid to Ukraine, let alone why U.S. foreign policy had been turned on its head, seemingly overnight, in such a shockingly dangerous way.

Only later would Americans learn what had happened behind the scenes.

What happened was exactly what you might have expected, knowing what we do now about Donald Trump’s allegiances as a politician: to himself, first and foremost, and secondarily, because of its association with this first and most important allegiance, to Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. The national interests of the United States were always, during Trump’s presidency, a third consideration at best—and the safety and security of our longstanding European allies apparently no consideration at all.

Behind the scenes, we now know, Trump was telling his advisers that he didn’t want the U.S. to send weapons to Ukraine, as in his estimation (a) the United States had no vital national interest in defending Europe from Russian invasion, (b) arming Ukraine would anger Russia in a way Trump (without explanation) deemed unacceptable and problematic, and (c) Ukraine did not deserve America’s aid because—apparently unlike Russia—it was a backward, corrupt country.

A Grander Plot Emerges

Even those who casually follow events on the world stage will understand the logical obscenity of each component of Trump’s “reasoning”—to the extent it even deserves that title—on Ukraine. Such casual observers will understand that Trump’s basis for putting a secret hold on American military aid to Ukraine couldn’t possibly have been supported by any national security briefing the then–president had ever received, as indeed the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Vladimir Putin in 2017 (as in 2022) was that he’s a murderous autocrat who aims to reconstitute the Soviet Union as a kleptocracy, a savage scheme requiring that Russia repeatedly invade Europe and annex parts of it. Trump would’ve been told that blocking Putin’s illegal adventurism was a vital national interest for America; that “angering Russia” was not a coherent basis for refusing to aid Ukraine, as the comparatively small size of Russia’s economy meant that it could not substantially harm the United States short of a nuclear war (which arms shipments to Ukraine weren’t about to provoke); and that Russia was not merely “as corrupt” as Ukraine—and perhaps even more so—but indeed was the author of much systemic corruption in the government and industry of its western neighbor.

In short, Trump’s views on U.S.-Ukraine relations in 2017 would have been seen, by anyone who knew the country and was in a position to brief Trump on it, as not only foolhardy and perverse but actually inexplicable short of some sordid, clandestine preoccupation by the sitting president. Moreover, the withholding of Javelins from Ukraine stood a real chance of unbalancing the still-“hot” strategic stalemate in the Donbas and letting Russia solidify its sizable, proxy-held, and ready-for-annexation “territory” there.

The damage of Trump’s decision—never explained to Pentagon officials, let alone to Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko—was compounded by the fact that at the time it was made Poroshenko was in the midst of seeking the second-most important thing a Ukrainian president at war with Russia can procure, after military aid from the U.S.: a face-to-face audience with the American president.

Those of us who gravely understand the human foibles and follies of most American presidents may find it hard to figure why a visit to the White House to meet the U.S. president is at the top of every Ukrainian president’s geopolitical agenda (including Volodymyr Zelensky, who made such a request his second-ever ask of Donald Trump, after the reestablishment of Javelin sales to his war-torn country). But in fact it should not be so hard to grok, as Poroshenko’s top foreign policy priority in 2017—continued U.S. military aid—was inextricably tied to his second. Simply put, Ukraine’s survival in 2017, and still today, remains entwined with the degree to which its continuation as a nation is supported by the United States. For this reason, any post-Euromaidan pol in Ukraine who stands at odds with America’s president is, politically speaking, DOA.

It’s simply unsustainable for a Ukrainian president not to enjoy the active support and favor of his American counterpart.

And so it was in 2017, when Poroshenko’s team began frantically lobbying Trump for an audience (and press availability) with him in the White House via a “state visit.”

Poroshenko knew that his legitimacy as Ukraine’s commander-in-chief hinged in major part on his ability to secure military aid, and in second substantial part on his demonstration to his voters that he enjoyed a mutually respectful relationship with the American president. And Trump sought to deny him realization of either goal.

Was Trump’s recalcitrance the byproduct of some perverse fealty to Vladimir Putin, who still held the keys to Trump completing either of his still-not-abandoned real estate goals—the fruition of his 2014 Trump Tower Moscow Letter of Intent with Putin’s architect, Aras Agalarov, or the fruition of his 2015 Trump Tower Moscow Letter of Intent with a second Kremlin ally?

No, in fact. While such venal concerns were undoubtedly still in play for Trump, the broader map of his geopolitical calculations was even more treacherous and unsightly.

Trump’s primary objection to the 2017 Javelin deal was that he wanted Ukraine’s several ongoing criminal investigations of his 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to stop. Put another way, just as one half of the second volume of the Mueller Report covered Trump’s commission of a dozen acts of Obstruction of Justice in his effort to hide his collusion with the Russians in 2016, the second chapter of Trump’s war on Ukraine held precisely the same throughline: Donald Trump obstructing the entirety of U.S.-Ukraine foreign policy out of a fear that a Mueller-like Ukrainian investigation of Paul Manafort would reveal his own unforgivable crimes.

As we now know from the first volume of the Mueller Report and the subsequent—even longer and more extensive—bipartisan Trump-Russia report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, not only did Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign secretly collude with Russian intelligence during the period Russian intelligence was at war with the United States and seeking, via cyberterrorism, to end U.S. democracy, but the author of that collusion was (notably, as correctly alleged by the controversial Steele dossier well before it was common knowledge) Kremlin agent Paul Manafort, who as we’ve seen had been under a contract with Kremlin lieutenant Oleg Deripaska since 2006.

Given that Donald Trump was Paul Manafort’s first client when the latter became a political consultant in the 1980s; given that the two men were thereafter in semi-regular contact in both political and professional contexts, with Manafort continuing to do lobbying work on Trump’s behalf and inviting him to be his personal guest at a GOP national convention in the 1990s; given that one of Manafort’s first actions, upon signing a $10-million-a-year contract with a Kremlin proxy, was to move into Trump Tower, the location of Trump’s personal residence in New York City; given that at that time Trump was under active recruitment by the post-KGB FSB, and had at least one Kremlin ally (Felix Sater) working for him as a spotter for overseas investments, most notably in Russia (with any such investments implicitly requiring Kremlin approval); given that less than 24 months after being forced to abandon his long stewardship of Putin’s puppet in Ukraine, Manafort told Trump’s best friend, Thomas Barrack, that he had to “get to” Trump to offer him similar stewardship services pro bono (though in fact Manafort appears to have still been under his lucrative Kremlin contract); given that Trump was well aware of Manafort’s work on behalf of the Kremlin in Ukraine when he brought him aboard his presidential campaign in March of 2016, not only because the seedy political consultant’s service to the Kremlin was on his unofficial job application to the Trump campaign but because he and Trump had been in semi-regular contact during the period Manafort lived in Trump Tower just a few floors below Trump; given that Manafort somehow managed to take over Trump’s entire political campaign within 21 days, despite only being hired as the GOP candidate’s “convention manager”; given that, per Manafort’s daughter, from the moment that he joined the Trump campaign her father and Trump were “thick as thieves,” regularly holding impromptu private meetings at Trump Tower; given that Manafort worked alongside Trump to sabotage U.S. policy toward Ukraine in the run-up to the 2016 Republican National Convention; given that Manafort was a co-architect, alongside future Kremlin employee Dimitri Simes and Kremlin-compromised energy analyst George Papadopoulos and Russian Alfa Bank adviser Richard Burt, of then-candidate Trump’s historically pro-Kremlin foreign policy agenda, first announced at an event at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel Manafort had coordinated; given that Trump regularly communicated with Manafort about his desperate desire, in the summer of 2016, for both Manafort and Michael Flynn to do whatever it took (including making contact with Kremlin agents) to find Hillary Clinton documents stolen by the Russians; given that Trump made this desire public in the summer of 2016 by publicly asking for the Kremlin to collude with his campaign (directly asking that it illegally acquire these documents or else make them public, if it already had them); and given that we now know that, during this same period, Manafort was meeting secretly with Russian intelligence, passing proprietary Trump campaign data (quickly put to use by Kremlin agents) to Russian intelligence, and was openly confirming to Russian intelligence that his work with Trump’s campaign was intended as partial performance on his ongoing, mutually beneficial financial arrangement with the Kremlin; there can be no doubt that in 2017 there was no greater threat to Trump’s personal freedom than any government-run criminal investigation into the illicit activities of either Manafort or Flynn, whether in the United States or in Ukraine.

In the United States, Trump’s fear on this score led him to commit at least a dozen federal crimes—all falling under the federal criminal statute prohibiting Obstruction of Justice—to include directly asking then-FBI director James Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn, then firing Comey when he refused to publicly state that neither the Flynn investigation nor any other FBI investigation into possible Trump-Russia collusion would implicate Trump personally. As to Manafort, Trump’s actions in the United States centered on using his legal team to promise his former campaign manager a presidential pardon if he’d agree to lie to federal investigators or otherwise mislead them about his own (and presumably also Trump’s) words and actions in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election.

In Ukraine, Trump’s fear of being caught committing the most heinous crimes in the history of the American presidency led him to focus with laser precision on one topic to the exclusion of all others: the several overlapping criminal investigations that were then ongoing in Ukraine relating to Manafort’s years of political machinations in Kyiv.

Donald Trump, Faux Anti-Corruption Crusader

To the extent Donald Trump spent 2017 privately complaining about “corruption” in Ukraine, and to the extent that as late as the fall of 2019 he would be justifying the actions that would in short order lead to his first impeachment by citing his concerns about Ukraine on that score, the term corruption was—from start to finish—a mere euphemism for the president’s implausible and entirely self-serving “belief” that the only reason the Ukrainians were investigating Manafort was to embarrass and harm him politically. Trump had concocted a conspiracy theory he couldn’t possibly have earnestly believed, as it received no support whatsoever from the public record of any briefing he had received from U.S. intelligence: that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, doing so by falsely accusing Trump’s 2016 campaign manager of early- to mid-2010s crimes inside Ukraine. In this preposterous view, the sole purpose for any continued investigation of Paul Manafort in Ukraine was to damage Trump’s odds of re-election.

In fact, the opposite was true.

Poroshenko’s decision to allow investigations of pro-Kremlin corruption in Ukraine during the early to mid-2010s was precisely what had been asked of him by the entirety of the West: to root out the vestiges of Kremlin-sponsored corruption within his new government. That Paul Manafort should have been the focus of such an uprooting was of course entirely expected by all parties, as Manafort had served as a Rasputin—the chief poison-whisperer—to Putin’s puppet in Kyiv, Viktor Yanukovych. Indeed, it was even believed that Manafort had advised the massacre of unarmed Ukrainian civilians that led to the events of the Euromaidan Revolution. So it was, in fact, unthinkable that any Ukrainian president could battle corruption without investigating Paul Manafort’s activities in Ukraine, and indeed it was Trump’s inexplicable decision to hire a man with the blood of innocents on his hands that had put Trump in the very predicament he now seemed to think justified a melodramatic devolution in U.S.-Ukraine relations.

By withholding military aid to Ukraine in 2017 and 2018 and making it widely enough understood that the Manafort investigations in Ukraine were a major cause of this withholding, Trump was pleasing the Kremlin as well—and in the most perverse way possible. Because American policy with respect to Ukraine required that Ukraine investigate pre-Euromaidan-era Kremlin-sponsored corruption, most especially the systemic rot within the Ukrainian government that Yanukovych and Manafort had deliberately advanced because (most notably in regard to the Ukrainian energy sector) it fabulously enriched the Kremlin generally and Putin personally, if Trump could get Poroshenko to end all investigation of Manafort it would simultaneously protect Trump legally and please the Kremlin by pushing Ukraine even farther from acceptance into NATO in the medium term, a prerequisite for which was the dramatic diminishing of the nation’s by-now-systematized corruption.

Indeed, while Putin’s primary reason for (a) invading Ukraine in 2014, and (b) funding a civil war there, was his staunch belief that Ukraine had no right to exist as a nation independent from the Russian state, he was also aware that underlying this broader strategy was a discrete tactical concern: that his desired re-integration of Ukraine into Russia would be impossible, not just figuratively but literally, if Ukraine were to join NATO at any point ever—whether in 2025, 2030, 2035, or 2040. It was therefore essential to Putin’s grand plan for post-Soviet conquest that Ukraine perpetually be deemed by the West too “corrupt” to ever be admitted into NATO. To this end, not only did Putin sponsor continued corruption inside Ukraine’s energy and government sectors—quite apart from having just invaded the country and paying for its ongoing civil war—but sought for his allies to likewise pound in an unrelenting drumbeat the notion that Ukraine was uniquely corrupt and was therefore unsuitable for the polite society of other democratic nations (a premise that applied with almost equal force to Ukraine’s potential admission to the European Union as to its admission into NATO).

In 2017 and 2018—a period during which, incredibly, Trump was still in secret phone contact with Paul Manafort on the subject of domestic and foreign policy, and also a period in which not only was Manafort under federal indictment but still in contact with Russian intelligence in the person of his longtime sidekick Konstantin Kilimnik—Trump’s constant public and private complaints about so-called corruption in Ukraine, and his concurrent sponsoring of that corruption by withholding military aid to Ukraine over its anti-corruption efforts, was perfectly in line with the Kremlin policy Manafort was under lucrative contract to promote within the United States.

Indeed, we would subsequently learn that much of Trump’s discourse with Manafort in 2017 and 2018 was about (a) Ukraine, and (b) Manafort’s claims (all of which were later revealed by federal prosecutors to be false, though Trump already had every reason to think them false in 2017 and 2018) that he had never run afoul of any laws whatsoever in infiltrating the Ukrainian government on the Kremlin’s behalf for years.

In short, Trump had Petro Poroshenko exactly where he (and Putin) wanted him to be.

Those readers who know how this particular chapter of the Trump-Ukraine story ends—Ukraine does get its Javelins—may wonder how either Trump or Putin allowed such a transfer to ultimately take place. Surely Trump could have secretly forestalled the sale of Javelins to Ukraine indefinitely, even if through the preposterous mechanism of a never-explained OMB hold on a Pentagon disbursement?

And the answer is yes—Trump and Putin could have done so. But it would have been unwise; there was much more to gain by giving Poroshenko some of what he wanted.

Petro Poroshenko Makes His Move

Poroshenko was not without any leverage, after all. He not only had ultimate oversight of multiple investigations into Paul Manafort that would (potentially) have revealed major malfeasance by Trump and maybe Putin himself—if they forced Manafort into some sort of cooperation deal, or if they uncovered evidence related to how Manafort came to work for Trump—and (certainly) revealed corruption or worse by Putin allies and pro-Kremlin Ukrainians, the Ukrainian president also had physical “possession” of a man whose ability to upend things was even more dramatic: Konstantin Kilimnik.

Because Kilimnik was within the borders of Ukraine, Poroshenko was in a position to have him arrested at any time as part of the Manafort investigations, which themselves—as noted—could be disposed of more or less consistent with Poroshenko’s desires.

But these weren’t the only investigations over which Poroshenko had some control, and here’s where the story gets so complicated that to even summarize it is difficult.

As this article has already noted, the focus of Kremlin-sponsored corruption inside Ukraine has always been Ukraine’s energy industry, for the obvious reason that—as the late senator John McCain (R-AZ) once said—Putin’s Russia is little more than a “gas station masquerading as a country.” So of course its ability to extract wealth from Ukraine in the oil and gas industries is central to its exploitation of that country.

One of the major corruption scandals inside Ukraine’s energy industry involved a company known as Burisma, whose advisory board Joe Biden’s son Hunter would join after the period of time during which the corruption in question occurred. Just as Ukraine’s efforts to combat corruption saw full expression in its federal prosecutors’ pursuit of the truth about Manafort, its attempts to impress upon U.S. diplomats its new commitment to countering corruption included an investigation of the pre-Hunter era at Burisma—an investigation that had been ongoing for years. This investigation had long been stymied, however, by a corrupt prosecutor named Viktor Shokin. Fired for corruption by the Ukrainian government the same month Trump hired Manafort, Shokin sought to protect Burisma—and hide rampant Kremlin-sponsored corruption—by refusing to prosecute the former head of the company, Mykola Zlochevsky, and indeed engaging in actions that aided and abetted the villain’s escape from justice.

So what does any of this—all of which is discussed in much greater detail, and with far greater specificity, in Proof of Corruption—have to do with Trump, Poroshenko, and Putin? Well, even as Poroshenko sought Javelins and a White House invite, and even as Trump and Putin sought an extension of Ukraine’s dark history of corruption via a premature end to the Manafort investigations, both Trump and Putin saw real benefit in the return of the corrupt Viktor Shokin to power. The reinstatement of Mr. Shokin would ensure the continued cover-up of the Burisma scandal and of Kremlin-funded corruption in Ukraine—the revelation of which, especially as to its source, would aid Ukraine in its medium-term NATO bid—but would also, Trump came to understand by 2018, benefit Trump politically inside the United States. Why? Because, consistent with his penchant for corruption and deceit, Shokin had begun falsely saying that he was fired because of Joe Biden.

Biden: the very man Trump had come to believe, by 2018, would be his Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential election.

The entirely false story Shokin told, which framed anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine vocally supported by a unified West as the clandestine machinations of an American politician seeking to protect his son from criminal charges, was of enormous interest to Trump and his unscrupulous personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani. The two men saw that, the truth notwithstanding—namely that Shokin had hidden Burisma’s corruption, and that Hunter Biden’s tenure at Burisma had post-dated it—the idea that the Obama administration’s anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine were in fact pro-corruption efforts of the most venal sort was a falsehood they could easily sell to unsuspecting American voters.

In fairness, it was an ingenious—if morally bankrupt—plan. Using Biden’s gallant anti-corruption effort in Ukraine against him, and indeed aiming to turn his well-deserved reputation for decency on its head, would at once achieve five of Trump’s major goals:

1. It would weaken Biden politically at a time when Trump believed him to be the strongest Democratic candidate in a sizable Democratic primary field;

2. it would turn attention away from his own corrupt dealings with Russia and the former Soviet states, making his greatest political liability a liability for the man he deemed his most likely 2020 adversary;

3. it would serve as a basis for demanding a raft of concessions—both public ones (politics-related) and private ones (Manafort-related)—from Petro Poroshenko, as nothing could be more damaging to a new Ukrainian president than to have the President of the United States accuse him of suborning systemic domestic corruption to the detriment of Ukraine’s relations with the West generally and America specifically;

4. it would serve as a justification for blocking military aid to Ukraine, something Trump did not want to provide Putin’s sworn enemy for a host of reasons relating to both politics (e.g., his desire for Putin to assist him in winning the 2020 presidential election, just as the Kremlin had aided Trump’s 2016 victory) and business (e.g., his desire for Putin to approve the Trump Organization building projects it had declined to assist prior to Trump becoming president); and

5. it would obscure Kremlin-sponsored corruption in Ukraine, which was an urgent priority for Trump given the necessity of keeping Putin on his side politically and geopolitically.

We might add that Trump would’ve been drawn, too, to the most sadistic elements of the plot: (6) destroying the reputation of a man admired for his integrity; (7) using the sole surviving son of a still-grieving parent to destroy that parent’s life; (8) betraying American national security (indeed directly aiding a U.S. adversary) under the cloak of valiantly fighting supposed corruption on America’s behalf; (9) positioning himself to have both sides of a hot war simultaneously in his debt and seeking to curry favor with him; and (10) doing all of this without ever having to formally announce any change to U.S. foreign policy, as an essentially anonymous hold on U.S. military aid to Ukraine through the OMB would so confuse the Pentagon and everyone else that it would take months or even years to disentangle it. It was a plan steeped in chaos, and it was cruel; it was cavalierly callous, and an extraordinary act of contempt against the country that made Donald Trump; yet somehow all of this seemed to make him love it all the more.

And the plan worked.

It worked because, as both Trump and Putin could’ve easily anticipated, Poroshenko had no choice but to ensure it would work.

The Deal

The price for Trump removing his first block on military aid to Ukraine—the one no one ever talks about—was extraordinarily high for Ukraine.

All of the investigations of Paul Manafort in Ukraine were summarily suspended.

Konstantin Kilimnik was allowed to leave Ukraine, putting him outside the reach of both Robert Mueller and Ukrainian investigators. Kilimnik immediately fled to Russia—and not just anywhere in Russia, but a secure compound run by the very Russian intelligence unit (the GRU) that Flynn was so fond of and that had attacked America’s electoral infrastructure in 2016.

Ukraine took possession of the Javelins, but with the understanding that they would never be used against Russian regulars—a stipulation Trump had insisted upon and which, not to put too fine a point on it, would have made the weapons useless to Ukraine had Putin invaded Ukraine at any point during Trump’s first or (prospective) second term.

Poroshenko did not get the full state visit at the White House he sought, nor did he get Trump’s endorsement in the 2019 presidential election in Ukraine—an endorsement that he and his political team had begun actively seeking by the end of 2018.

Poroshenko’s anti-corruption efforts flagged substantially, just as Trump and Putin had wanted—and as all parties knew would continue to push Ukraine farther and farther from NATO membership and the military protection of a U.S.-led alliance.

The Ukrainians now accepted that continued military aid from the United States was contingent; that it could not be taken for granted that aid would be forthcoming in the future under Trump (which undoubtedly would have played havoc with Ukraine’s military planning in the midst of a war in which it was decidedly outmatched); and it was clear that the U.S. would play no role in advancing the cause of Ukraine’s future admission to NATO. And yet, even in the midst of this devolution of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship to contingent status, Trump would still not agree to release the Javelins until Poroshenko had agreed to at least one fabulously pro-U.S. transportation deal that the sitting president planned to boast about in his re-election campaign (in part as a false, indeed empty indication of his supposed comity with the Ukrainians, an excellent cover for the real nature of his relationship with that country’s leadership).

Not long after the end of the year in which Trump finally released a batch of heavily conditioned Javelins to Ukraine, the U.S. president began piling on additional slights Poroshenko now knew he was in no position to oppose: the summary firing of a U.S. ambassador (Marie Yovanovitch) Ukraine had been working beneficially with to fight corruption and draw closer to the West (though Yovanovitch’s relationship with the Poroshenko administration had undoubtedly soured, in large due to Donald Trump’s clandestine endeavors); the continued elevation, by Trump, in U.S. domestic politics, of a deviously corrupt former Ukrainian official (Shokin) who Poroshenko knew to be a deceitful pro-Kremlin pawn, but who he could not speak out against forcefully for fear of angering Trump (and possibly losing his slim chance of a Trump endorsement in his race against upstart actor-turned-politician Volodymyr Zelensky); the ongoing weakening of U.S. sanctions against Russia for its 2014 invasion of Ukraine—a cruel imposition on Poroshenko’s administration and his country, as it put it in the position of suffering quietly as the U.S. effectively condoned Russia’s annexation of a significant percentage of Ukrainian territory.

But more than any of this is the simple fact that Trump—and a small cabal of agents he’d directly tasked with this mission in December 2018—began 2019 seeking to use the Poroshenko-Zelensky tilt as leverage to seek active Ukrainian interference in the 2020 U.S. election, an end Trump would seek even as (devilishly) he loudly proclaimed that the Ukrainians were working with his political enemies and had been since 2016.

2019: Trump Launches His Fifth Attack on Ukraine

We come now to a chapter of the Trump-Ukraine story so complicated that it cannot be adequately summarized. It is so complex, and involves so many figures in Ukraine whose names Americans are unfamiliar with, that even the talented House managers in Trump’s first impeachment trial excised this entire section of the Trump-Ukraine scandal—which by volume makes up at least half its content—from their presentation to the United States Senate and U.S. voters in early 2020. The story was so necessary to tell, but so difficult to tell in anything like a succinct way, that it compelled me to write a book I never aimed or expected to write: Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020).

Fortunately, the foregoing sections of this article have given at least a sense of what Trump and his political agents were up to in America, Russia and Ukraine throughout 2019: the most audacious course of “ratfuckery” in American political history, a sordid plot involving the Ukrainian energy industry, low-life pro-Kremlin hustlers in and out of the Ukrainian government, profoundly dangerous Kremlin-backed oligarchs in Ukraine and Russia, secret meetings between Trump agents and sinister foreign nationals in countries across the globe, a stolen laptop, a fired U.S. ambassador, and components even more esoteric that simply cannot be addressed in any detail here.

What we can do, instead, is consider the upshot: that in the winter of 2018-2019 Mr. Trump put together a group of political allies—including since-indicted donors, now-under-investigation Trump legal advisers and attorneys, the current head of Trump’s failed social media gambit (Devin Nunes and Truth Social, respectively), a corrupt journalist (John Solomon), and a man (Kash Patel) Trump would shortly install at the highest levels of the Pentagon and consider making the new head of the CIA—whose job, quite simply, was to steal the 2020 presidential election through collusion with America’s enemies: indeed, the same enemies Trump’s 2016 campaign had colluded with to great success.

On my Twitter feed and in Proof of Corruption, this team of unscrupulous miscreants is referred to as the “BLT Prime Team” because they met regularly in BLT Prime, the restaurant inside Trump’s Washington, D.C. hotel, Trump International Hotel. (Yes, that’s right—the same hotel that would be used by Trump’s political operation, along with the nearby Willard Hotel, to plot the January 6 insurrection.) Before the hotel was used to plot the overthrow of a democratically elected government, it was used (and by some of the same people) to ensure the 2020 election wasn’t a free or fair one.

A handful of the key figures in this effort have already been introduced, most notably Viktor Shokin, the corrupt and justly fired Ukrainian prosecutor who’d concocted an audacious, pro-Kremlin myth to try to get his job back, falsely alleging a Democratic plot to use the might of the U.S. federal government to protect Joe Biden’s wayward son from criminal prosecution overseas. That Hunter Biden had done nothing wrong with respect to Burisma—a premise since confirmed by Ukrainian prosecutors in public statements made while Trump was still president (so we know these statements weren’t made to please Joe Biden)—was no obstacle to the BLT Prime Team’s scheme.

But also involved in this conspiracy on the Kremlin-sympathizer-Ukrainian side were a sequence of even lesser-known bagmen whose ambition was every bit as audacious as Shokin’s: they sought to work with Trump attorneys and under-indictment Putin-allied oligarchs to manufacture the most comically improbable line of political rhetoric any American alive in the 2010s could imagine, namely the notion that Russia was not involved in any election interference in the United States in 2016—as in fact it had been West-allied anti-corruption reformers in Ukraine who had attacked America.

I think it’s important to state the obvious here: that this farcical narrative was crafted to tick every imaginable box on Vladimir Putin’s most fanciful wishlist—which is why, even at face value, the depth of its derangement is striking. If Trump and his team, via the use and manipulation of doctored documents and paid-for testimony, could get Americans to believe Ukraine rather than Russia was their enemy, this would at once serve all of these ends:

1. “Legitimize” Trump’s checkered 2016 election campaign and victory;

2. end U.S. military aid to Ukraine;

3. “legitimize” Trump’s business plans in Russia, a newfound U.S. ally;

4. exculpate Russia for the entirety of a cyberwar that it most definitely authored;

5. justify Trump’s plan to remove all sanctions on Russia;

6. allow Trump and Putin to push forward with a so-called “peace plan” advanced by pro-Kremlin Ukrainians from the earliest days of Trump’s presidency, a plan that would not only end all sanctions on Russia and give Russia large pieces of Ukraine free and clear but would pave the way for the lucrative, illicit multilateral energy-sector deal that Flynn had been working on for years with the Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis, Egyptians, and Russians;

7. position Trump as an ostensibly (if fraudulently) Nobel Peace Prize–deserving peacemaker in both Europe and the Middle East;

8. ensure that any suspicions relating to prospective foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election would fall upon Ukraine rather than Russia;

9. ensure, with Trump’s re-election, even more draconian expansions of Trump’s far-right domestic policy agenda (and his pro-Kremlin foreign policy); and

10. permanently discredit both the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, the two entities best positioned to monitor and reveal the domestic and international crimes committed by Trump, Putin, and their allies around the world between 2015 and 2020.

In other words, the stakes could not possibly have been higher—or the BLT Prime Team’s willingness to let propriety get in the way of advancing its scheme any less.

Volodymyr Zelensky Enters the Field of Play

The first and biggest wrinkle in Trump’s scheme was that by the spring of 2019 Petro Poroshenko had lost his re-election campaign in Ukraine—and by quite a fair margin.

His successor, political neophyte Volodymyr Zelensky, had won for the simple reason that he was able to convince the vast majority of Ukrainians that he, not Poroshenko, was an authentic anti-corruption crusader.

In fairness to Petro Poroshenko—who admittedly deserves no great admiration in the narrative that Proof is unfolding here—it was easier for Zelensky to campaign on a commitment to fighting corruption in Ukraine than it was for Poroshenko to oversee a sitting presidential administration that actually fought corruption, for the already-clear reason that, unlike Zelensky, Poroshenko had to deal directly with the most corrupt president in American history, who was (to boot) a Putin ally. As we have seen, it was to Trump’s benefit that Poroshenko permit pro-Kremlin rot to fester at the heart of Ukraine’s government and energy sector, and while surely the reason it did so fester was not exclusively because it was a plum for Trump, it certainly didn’t hurt that allowing two of the country’s most important anti-corruption probes (the Manafort and Burisma investigations) go down in flames was certain to endear Kyiv to the Trump White House to the extent any such endearment was possible. While in the end Trump did precisely nothing for Poroshenko—par for the course for anyone who enters into a deal with Trump—it is unsurprising that, as late as a few weeks before his landslide loss to Zelensky, Poroshenko held out hope that his attempts to please Trump would pay off politically inside Ukraine.

You might imagine, then, that Trump was extremely displeased by Zelensky’s big win, even if (and this is also par for the course with Trump) it was his own impetuousness, avarice, and withholding of promised aid that had likely aided in Poroshenko’s defeat. Indeed, when Ukrainians went to the polls in the spring of 2019, they had no reason to believe that Poroshenko was a man respected in D.C., or one who could effectively advocate for Ukraine’s desperate needs before the U.S. president. All Poroshenko’s lobbying of Trump came to naught, with the result that Trump found himself, by late spring of 2019, dealing with a Ukrainian president more firmly and unambiguously committed to the West and anti-corruption efforts than Poroshenko had been. And yes, this displeased Trump greatly.

As President Trump had heard from pro-Kremlin Ukrainians (via the interlocution of the BLT Prime Team) that this new Ukrainian president would be less likely play ball with Trump’s Kremlin-style kleptocratic horse-trading than Poroshenko, Zelensky’s election was a cause for concern inside Team Trump. While Trump had already gotten much of what he wanted—an end to the Manafort investigation; silence from Ukraine on the matter of Hunter Biden’s alleged misdeeds there as Team Trump ruthlessly lied about them; a transfer of military goods to Ukraine that wouldn’t actually help Kyiv in the event of a Russian ground invasion; and continued comity with Putin by virtue of Trump’s melodramatic standoffishness with Poroshenko (including refusing him a state visit even as he met privately with Putin over and over, including in the Finnish city of Helsinki, where he said he had no reason to believe Russia had meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election)—the cost had been one Trump had yet to internalize: the emergence of a new Ukrainian political superstar with whom he could not easily strike a corrupt geopolitical deal.

It’s with this history in mind that one must review the transcript of Trump’s “perfect” call with Zelensky on July 25, 2019.

This now-infamous call unfolded exactly how anyone with knowledge of Ukraine’s desperate plight, and Trump’s years-long war against Ukraine, might have expected:

1. Zelensky immediately brought up the notion of military aid from the United States (particularly Javelin missiles);

2. Zelensky, like his predecessor, focused heavily on his desire to come to D.C. to meet with President Trump as part of a full state visit;

3. Trump spread false conspiracy theories about Ukraine’s alleged involvement in the 2016 presidential election;

4. Trump raised allegations against the Bidens which had been leveled by men Trump knew to be corrupt pro-Kremlin prosecutors, which allegations had already been conclusively debunked by their successors (as Trump also knew);

5. Trump made clear that the two things Zelensky desperately wanted and needed (see above) hinged on Ukraine providing Trump with all the things he had been wanting for years, including:

   • the launch of a public investigation against the Bidens in Ukraine;

   • an acknowledgment of supposed Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 presidential election (which meddling did not, in fact, occur); and

   • a massive new investigation in Ukraine of that illusory meddling.

In the lead-up to these requests (from Zelensky) and demands (from Trump), the U.S. president had—following some opening pleasantries—done each of the following:

1. Implicitly attacked NATO and the EU as being of no use to Ukraine, an ominous statement about how little Trump valued or thought of the notion of Ukraine joining either NATO or the EU;

2. complained that Ukraine gets far more from the United States than the United States does from Ukraine, a bizarre statement given that no nation with an economy as small as Ukraine’s could possibly do as much for America as vice versa (moreover, this complaint erased Ukraine’s geopolitical significance as a bulwark between Europe and Russia, an erasure that underscored just how little Trump, unique among U.S. politicians, worried about the very real prospect of continued Russian aggression in Europe and former Soviet states); and

3. deliberately misunderstood Ukraine’s complaints about the insufficiency of the sanctions on Russia (an insufficiency caused by lax enforcement in Europe and, though Zelensky did not say it, by Trump’s administration) and his warm thanks to the United States for its military support as a confirmation of Trump’s very different complaint about Europe (which clearly focused on military issues rather than sanctions) and an opening to make non-military demands on Ukraine.

If it seemed, indeed, that the men were simultaneously having two entirely different conversations, it’s because they were. Zelensky’s line of discussion was similar to any other a Ukrainian president might establish in speaking to an American diplomat or president, raising the same concerns and issuing the same platitudes. By contrast, Trump’s monologue could as easily have been written by Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. Trump accused the Ukrainian government—and “accused” is the word for it—of “know[ing] a lot about” all the “[bad things America] has been through”, saying, of the foreign-interference scandal surrounding the 2016 election, that Ukraine (rather than Russia) needed to “find out what happened with [that] whole situation.”

It was, in short, precisely the script Kremlin agent Paul Manafort—who had been run out of Kyiv on a rail, figuratively speaking, years earlier—had given Trump in 2017.

But Trump’s attack on Zelensky—and here, too, I use the word “attack” advisedly—didn’t stop there, just as it would not have stopped there if Putin or Peskov or Paul Manafort had been on the phone instead of a man tasked with maintaining America’s strong and longstanding alliance with Ukraine. Trump falsely accused “Ukraine” (meaning, here, the Ukrainian government, which Zelensky now led) of “having the server” that the Russians (though Trump did not agree it was the Russians) hacked in 2016, and went on to falsely accuse the new Ukrainian president of “surrounding himself” with the “same people” who were responsible for the “whole situation” in 2016, in other words the “lot of [crimes] that went on” during the 2016 election cycle.

It was, of course, madness. And Trump knew it was madness—which is why his 2016 campaign, on his orders, hadn’t sought out Ukrainian hackers in the midst of the 2016 general election campaign, but Russian ones.

Trump’s pseudo-diplomatically framed allegations and accusations came with stark demands. He informed Zelensky that Attorney General Bill Barr would be calling his counterparts in Ukraine to launch an investigation into Ukraine’s own government—the very government Zelensky had just been elected to lead in a time of war—and made sure that Zelensky understood that any military aid to Ukraine (such as the very Javelins that Zelensky had just asked for directly, prompting Trump’s pro-Kremlin diatribe) was contingent upon Ukraine working with Trump’s handpicked AG to cannibalize Ukraine’s reputation on the world stage.

Again, Putin couldn’t have written a better script.

Of course, had it been Putin on the phone instead of Trump, Putin would’ve been sure to exculpate himself and Russia with respect to any election interference in the U.S. in 2016.

So that’s exactly what Trump did next in his call with Zelensky.

Trump called not just the allegations of Russian election interference in 2016 but even the investigation of such allegations “nonsense”, terming the investigation “poor” and “incompetent” in major part for its failure to realize that “a lot of it [the 2016 election scandal] started with Ukraine.” Recall that Trump was speaking to the head of the very government he was accusing of election interference; recall, too, that Zelensky well knew (indeed had already spoken of it in this very call) that the consequences for a nation found to have interfered with an American election were severe: crippling sanctions. So Zelensky wouldn’t have taken Trump’s accusations as polite banter, but a double threat: not just to withhold the military aid Trump was already withholding (and the evidence would ultimately show that Zelensky did have reason to believe the Javelins were being withheld at the time of the call) but to issue sanctions on Ukraine under Trump in the same way it had earlier issued sanctions on Russia under Obama.

Trump’s implicit two-part threat—the cessation of military funding and the potential imposition of penalties on Ukraine for election interference—cannot be understated as to its ruinous effect on U.S.-Ukraine relations. Why? Because if the United States were to cease arming Ukraine and level sanctions against it, it would likely mean the collapse of the Ukrainian economy followed hard upon by a ground invasion by Russia.

In short, what Trump was discussing could have meant the end of Ukraine as a nation.

So when Trump told Zelensky it was “very important” that Zelensky do what was being demanded of him, the implications of not doing it were unmistakable—and couldn’t possibly have been more dire. Trump knew this not only because he had been briefed on Ukraine repeatedly as president, but because his 2016 campaign manager had virtually run Ukraine for years. So we must understand that when John Bolton says that Trump could barely find Ukraine on a map during his presidency, it is a bizarre misdirection on the matter of just how well Trump understood Ukraine’s vulnerabilities and aimed to use them to corruptly grasp additional power in America.

Sadly, Trump’s assessment of Ukraine’s vulnerabilities—and thus Zelensky’s—was correct, even if his response to that assessment bore no relationship at all to what his White House advisers on Ukraine (among them Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman) had urged. (Indeed, during Trump’s first impeachment trial Hill and Vindman would testify under oath that Trump’s words to Zelensky were a shock to them because they didn’t in any way match the preparation Trump had been given for the call; what Hill and Vindman didn’t understand is that Trump had been well-prepared for that call, it was simply that his briefers had been Kremlin agents Manafort and Simes, not men and women working in America’s national interest as non-partisan policy analysts.)

Zelensky well understood that for all that Trump had spoken of his Attorney General working with Ukraine as the Ukrainian government—at Trump’s demand—sought to needlessly investigative and falsely accuse itself of things it never did (so that Trump could then punish Ukraine for such illusory malfeasance), what Trump really wanted was for Ukraine to backslide on its anti-corruption efforts by working with Trump’s private attorney to help Trump steal the upcoming U.S. presidential election. So it was that Zelensky, just spoken to by Trump of William Barr, said the following in response:

I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation [the one Trump had just demanded], I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly. That I can assure you.

It is hard to read the above, in retrospect, knowing that Zelensky understood himself to be a wartime president and was just 30 months from seeing his country invaded by the second-strongest military in the world—one ordered into battle by a man Trump had been seeking to collude with for years via the assistance of a man (Manafort) then considered one of the most hated in Ukraine’s short history as a post-Soviet nation.

But Trump was unrelenting. Zelensky’s concessions only made him more strident:

Good because I heard you had a prosecutor [Viktor Shokin] who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine {NB: Trump here uses a phrase, “the Ukraine,” that implies he believes Ukraine is still to be considered a region inside Russia} were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing: there’s a lot of talk about [Joe] Biden’s son [Hunter], that Biden stopped the prosecution [of Burisma by Viktor Shokin] and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. [Joe] Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it, it sounds horrible to me.

Again, the “very good prosecutor” Trump is referring to (in fact he calls him a “very good prosecutor” twice) is Shokin, who was universally reviled inside and outside Ukraine as thoroughly corrupt, and had indeed “shut down” a major investigation—but it was the one looking at Putin’s allies, rather than Biden’s allies. In fact, there was no Biden probe because there was no evidence the Bidens had done anything wrong—either father or son—as Shokin’s successor, Yuri Lutsenko, would finally concede after briefly attempting (in an effort to save his own job) to tell Giuliani the opposite.

Still between a rock and a hard place, President Zelensky responded to Trump’s continued aggression by lauding him for firing Yovanovich—the anti-corruption-crusading U.S. ambassador to Ukraine—and agreeing to investigate Burisma (the latter an easier pill to swallow, as in fact it was Putin’s allies within Burisma, not Hunter Biden, who a restarted Burisma investigation would be looking into, most notably its corrupt former chief, Mykola Zlochevsky, who Shokin let off the hook).

But Trump still wouldn’t stop.

Well, she [Yovanovich] is going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I’m sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor [Shokin] was treated very badly and he was a very fair prosecutor so good luck with everything. Your economy is going to get better and better I predict.

It is telling that Trump made no mention of Ukraine having a bright future until he was reassured by Zelensky—multiple times—that Ukraine would do as Trump bid it. There is no sense that Trump would have issued this bromide absent concessions by Zelensky, which is telling given that Trump’s implicit threat of sanctions against Ukraine for its supposed orchestration of 2016 election interference would surely have prevented Ukraine’s economy from, as Trump predicted, “get[ting] better and better.”

Despite Trump’s apparent desire to wind up the call—“good luck with everything”—Zelensky still had one card he needed to play, which was to suggest to Trump that Ukraine could be of use to him because it had significant energy resources (you’ll recall that international energy deals had been a constant focus of Trump’s, even pre-election, despite them lying well outside his area of expertise or public engagement).

As to the economy, there is much potential for our two countries, and one of the issues that is very important for Ukraine is energy independence. I believe we can be very successful and cooperating on energy independence with United States. We are already working on cooperation. We are buying American oil, but I am very hopeful for a future meeting. We will have more time and more opportunities to discuss these opportunities and get to know each other better.

This, however, was a topic Trump had no interest in. Ukraine convicting itself of 2016 election interference (falsely)? Yes, Trump was engaged by this. Ukraine indicting the Bidens for alleged acts of corruption (falsely)? Yes, this too had Trump’s attention. But seeing Ukraine as an ally on the same order as Russia, with whom Trump and his national security team had been secretly working on a massive energy deal for years? This, Trump felt, was a waste of his time, as his curt response to Zelensky confirmed:

Good. Well, thank you very much, and I appreciate that. I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call. Thank you.

The call ended shortly thereafter.

It’s important to understand here that Trump wasn’t merely using Ukraine as a pawn; he wasn’t, in fact, offering anything in return, either. He made no promise regarding the Javelins, and indeed maintained his hold on their transfer to Ukraine for so many months after this that it led to his impeachment (and the missiles were only released once it was clear that not doing so risked ending Trump’s presidency). As to the fake “investigations” he wanted Ukraine to pursue, Trump knew—as did Zelensky—that if Ukraine declared itself guilty of 2016 election crimes it would face crippling sanctions from the United States, and if it falsely declared Joe or Hunter Biden guilty of crimes in the midst of a likely Trump-Biden presidential race, it would be ending its ability to work with politicians in the Democratic Party ever again. In short, Trump was asking Zelensky to choose between ruin and ruin; he gave Ukraine no path forward toward anything but darkness and chaos, a trap that ensured Putin would be better positioned than ever before to do exactly what he (and candidly Trump) wanted to see happen: an end to Ukraine and its immediate annexation, in part or in full, by Putin’s vile regime.

2020: Just Impeached By Congress for His Attacks on Ukraine, Trump Briefly Shuts up About Ukraine

While there is much in Proof of Corruption about the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, little of that book follows events in 2020—the Black Lives Matter protests of Summer 2020, or the first harrowing months of the COVID-19 pandemic, excepted—as the decision by the U.S. House of Representatives to impeach Trump for extorting Ukraine resulted in Trump’s first-ever period of quiescence in what had, by then, been a half-decade of geopolitical, diplomatic, and economic war against that country.

That 2020, and for that matter 2021, saw fairly little Trump-Ukraine activity teaches America an important lesson: when Trump is facing accountability for something—a feeling to which he’s entirely unaccustomed—he can be fairly quickly cowed. As 2020 began, Trump was staring down the possibility of becoming the first U.S. president removed from office; while Trump was not ultimately convicted by the Senate, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) did become the first Republican to vote for the removal from office a president of his own party, with senator’s principled vote making the opinion that Trump should be removed not just a majority Senate opinion but a bipartisan one.

What is striking about this is that Trump’s first impeachment couldn’t possibly have been more narrow in scope, nor more aggressively excised almost the entirety of the sequence of illicit actions by Trump and his political team that led to it. Even if you watched the entirety of Trump’s first impeachment trial—including the mesmerizing closing argument of House manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), which stands as one of the great speeches in American history—you had little sense of many of the facts outlined in this Proof article, let alone the full stock of staggeringly harrowing proof contained in the 1,500+ pages of the Proof trilogy. You may have agreed with Schiff’s wholly just, correct, and prescient prediction that Trump would not stop attacking American democracy if acquitted of seeking to throttle Ukraine’s young democracy, but you wouldn’t have fully understood the scope of the threat Trump posed either in Europe or here in America.

Following Trump’s acquittal in February 2020—just nine months before his landslide defeat at the hands of Joe Biden—the then-president refocused himself on stealing the presidency, this time by means other than the extortion of a close European ally.

Proof of Corruption tells the story of some of this refocusing, from Trump publicly and privately asking the Chinese Communist Party to collude with him to defeat Biden in the summer and fall of 2020—arguably an even more shocking course of attempted extortion and bribery than the one involving Ukraine, as it sought the aid of a hostile foreign nation, leveraged U.S. trade policy amid a pandemic-induced recession, and revealed a cover-up of what Trump and his team had known about the origins of COVID-19 and when—to Trump politicizing and lying about a public health crisis with fatal consequences for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Indeed, Trump was so busy mismanaging the pandemic and trying to exploit the damaged U.S. economy to extract more manufactured political dirt on the Bidens—this time from communists—that he hardly had time to order the assassination of the second-most-beloved man in Iran, Qasem Soleimani, at the request of the Israelis, Saudis, and Emiratis and then lie to U.S. voters about (a) the reason for the strike, and (b) the toll in U.S. casualties resulting from it (see the Trump-Iran chapter of Proof of Corruption). Meanwhile, the Kremlin—now under U.S. sanctions for both the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and pro-Trump cyberterrorism in 2016—was ill-positioned to again come to Trump’s political aid. Indeed, by 2020 there was some thought that any scandal further linking Trump and Russia would only damage the odds of Trump’s reelection, which continued to be in Putin’s best interest.

And yet, the Russia-Ukraine War continued on in 2020. Trump allies in the United States, though not so much their patron, continued to loudly grouse on Fox News and Breitbart about murky Ukrainian operatives having supposedly made common cause with the Democratic Party in 2016, though such obfuscatory fantasies seemed even more obtuse in 2020 than they had previously been—and besides, the United States was dealing with a killer pandemic. Russia was struggling with COVID-19 as well; Putin (like Trump) sought to hide the true extent of his nation’s coronavirus death toll in the first year of the pandemic, but because he controlled Russia with the very iron fist Trump had always sought to bring down upon the United States (but didn’t quite manage to), the former, unlike the latter, was largely successful at making Russia look like it’d only lightly been touched by a public health tragedy in 2020. The truth was quite different, of course, which helps explain why Russia was less able to exert itself abroad in the 2020 election cycle than it had been in 2016, though it nevertheless did what it could. After all, had Trump secured a second term in office, there would have been nothing keep him from more fully bringing Flynn back into the Trumpist fold and making good on the “grand bargain” the retired soldier had by 2020 been working on for years. And a second Trump term would have been taken by Trump, too, as an authorization to finally end for good U.S. sanctions on Russia (with the aid of his GOP compatriots in Congress, of course).

Had Putin launched a ground invasion of Ukraine in 2020—as it now seems he always planned to do at some point, using as staging areas Crimea, territory in Georgia he’d stolen, and a vassal state he’d constructed via his puppet Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus—it would have put Trump in an impossible position, and perhaps augured an even more embarrassing popular and electoral-college loss than Trump, in the event, actually suffered. Once Trump’s crimes against Ukraine in 2019 had been discovered (which discovery risked revealing, but to Trump’s good fortune didn’t actually result in the revelation of, his crimes against Ukraine in 2017 and 2018) it guaranteed that any Russian invasion of Ukraine would occur on the watch of the next American president.

And yet, it would remain absolutely mission-critical to Vladimir Putin, following the defeat of Donald Trump at the polls in November 2020, that Trump (a) remain willing to seek a return to power in 2024, (b) marshal the forces within his political party in a way that would weaken American democracy and increase the odds of such a political comeback, and (c) do everything possible to support Putin’s play in Ukraine without damaging his own political standing inside the United States—as Trump would be of no use to Putin going forward if he could not win re-election as U.S. president in 2024.

2022: Trump Launches His Sixth Attack on Ukraine

Trump’s Newest Legal Gambit

The above-discussed lawsuit that Donald Trump just filed in Florida—which falsely alleges that Hillary Clinton was part of a massive criminal conspiracy with both U.S. federal agents and individuals overseas to “rig” the 2016 presidential election against Trump—constitutes Trump’s sixth discrete assault on the nation of Ukraine. He now aims to wage the same fight against Ukraine that he did before his first impeachment, when, during his now-infamous July 2019 call with Volodymyr Zelensky, he raised the spectre of the United States siding with Russia and not Ukraine in an ongoing war (a premise still on the table should Trump become president against less than 36 months from now) and doing so at a time America would have issued new sanctions against Ukraine for alleged (but actually nonexistent) 2016 election meddling (likewise still on the table if Trump returns to the Oval Office).

While this author, and those reading this essay, have the luxury of deeming Trump’s lawsuit and the manufactured, evidence-free narrative behind it preposterous, even though he’s in the midst of a hot war with the world’s second-strongest military one could argue that President Zelensky does not have this luxury. He does not know what doctored documents or testimony sponsored by the Kremlin may make an appearance in Trump’s lawsuit, should it survive summary judgment; he does not know whether the anti-democratic statutes Republican state legislators are passing all over the U.S. in 2022 will lead to the first-ever popular-vote victory for Donald Trump as a POTUS candidate in 2024; and should Trump become president—unmoored from the burden of having to run for office again—Zelensky cannot know what sort of revenge Trump would seek against the Ukrainians for having not played ball with him in the past.

It’s in this light that Zelensky must hear of top Trump congressional ally Matt Gaetz (R-FL)—currently under criminal investigation for child sex trafficking—reading into the congressional record certain of the contents of Hunter Biden’s GOP-stolen laptop, which laptop the GOP claims will reveal collusion between Ukraine and the family of America’s Democratic president. (And in the event Zelensky doubts how serious the Republican Party is about making alleged Ukrainian collusion with U.S. politicians a domestic political issue in the United States, Gaetz just appeared at a Trump rally to declare that if the GOP takes back Congress in the 2022 congressional midterms, he will personally nominate Donald Trump to be the new Speaker of the House—a legal maneuver, as by tradition a House majority can elect whomever it wishes as Speaker, even someone not currently an elected official. As the new Speaker, Trump would be well-positioned to launch a highly public impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden that would allow him, too, to continue his endless war-by-other-means against Ukraine.)

Zelensky will also have seen BLT Prime Team member John Solomon again involving himself in a foreign election-interference plot, providing a televised platform for Trump to beg that Putin release political dirt on the Biden family—an unprecedented request for aid from a hostile foreign leader given that the West is arguably already in a war-by-proxy with Russia. Indeed, it is a request that is, at a minimum, a next-door neighbor to treason, putting aside the fact that it was made to a man Trump recently admitted had a role in a European “holocaust” now unfolding in Ukraine. How much Trump is actually troubled by a holocaust in a nation he himself is at war with—and has been for years—is certainly indicated by his continued willingness to seek illicit dealings with Putin.

Like anyone, Zelensky must now read the tea leaves. He has now heard, as we all have, the host of Russia’s equivalent of 60 Minutes call for immediate “regime change” in the United States—the illegal “reinstallment” of Trump as president—and glowingly refer to Trump as a “partner” of the Kremlin. He surely recalls how, after he had his call with Trump in July 2019—a call Trump repeatedly termed “perfect”—Trump’s political team hid the transcript of the exchange in the National Security Council’s hyper-secure NICE server, an unprecedented action that indicated the POTUS and/or his closest advisers saw the substance of the July 2019 Trump-Zelensky discussion as indicative of the very hostility between Trump and a longstanding U.S. ally this Proof article has sought to detail.

And no doubt Zelensky has seen, as we all have, how Trump told far-right entertainer Buck Sexton, at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that “Putin declar[ing] a big portion of [Ukraine]…independent” was “genius” and “wonderful” and “smart”, and more than this, Trump saying that Putin sending “more army tanks than I’ve ever seen” across the Ukrainian border—illegally—was both “strong” and “savvy.” Indeed, Trump was so giddy about Putin’s violations of international law that he couldn’t help repeating himself in singing Putin’s praises to Sexton, declaring fawningly that Putin announcing he was going to “go in [to Ukraine]” under the false pretense of a portion of Ukraine being “independent” and needing Russian help to “keep the peace” not just ineligible for Trump’s condemnation but “pretty savvy.” Days later, when Trump domestic policy adviser Sean Hannity would try repeatedly to get Trump to admit that Putin was either “evil” or simply an “adversary” of the United States, Trump refused.

As February has turned to March, and as Russia’s initial successes in Ukraine have turned to stinging defeats, Trump has tried to slightly change his tune—largely by denying he ever said things he said in actuality said on camera. At a March 26, 2022 presidential campaign rally he held under the continued pretense that he isn’t a declared 2024 candidate and therefore needn’t issue financial reports to the Federal Election Commission—even though, at all his rallies, Trump makes clear his 2024 intentions—the former president’s walkbacks were extraordinary in their number and scope. While confirming yet again that he believes Putin is “smart” (despite all the present evidence to the contrary), Trump also lied in two equally telling ways: (1) by contending that he only calls Putin “smart” in reply to questions from U.S. reporters (in fact, he suspiciously raises the compliment, at every turn, without any prompting), and (2) by falsely claiming he never believed Putin would send tanks into Ukraine, nor even that ever felt it wise (or genius, or wonderful, or smart, or savvy) for Putin to do so.

I actually thought he [Putin] was going to be negotiating [with Ukraine]. I said, “That’s a hell of a way to negotiate: put 200,000 soldiers on the border [of Ukraine].”

Of course, that’s not what Trump said.

In fact, he watched Russian tanks rolling across Ukraine’s border—and celebrated it.

Of course, Trump made his initial comments to Sexton at a time he believed Russia would defeat and annex Ukraine; his new version of events not only contemplates the opposite result, but how that result could be leveraged to his political benefit in 2024—namely, by crafting a made-up narrative about how prescient he was over Russian troops’ fate, even as he seeks to appeal to Putin’s presumptive desperation over his losses by urging the Russian autocrat to release information on Biden (which, coming as it does from the Kremlin in a time of war, would presumptively be disinformation).

What Trump said on March 26 is what U.S. voters will likely hear from him for the rest of 2022, as well as in 2023 and 2024—assuming the tide of the Russia-Ukraine war doesn’t change again. And yet we should also be clear about how comically unable to criticize Putin Trump was, even as he began trying to do so for the first time ever just 48 hours ago. See for yourself what the former president told a crowd on March 26:

It should have never happened. Certain things—and that thing—would have ended. But they didn’t have the common sense—they didn’t know what to do. We wouldn’t have even had to give ‘em. I think he got—he made a big mistake. I think he made a big mistake. What he’s done to so many people. But that was a big mistake. But it looked like a great negotiation that didn’t work out too well for him. The Biden border crossing...

Notice that not only is Trump here unwilling to even say Putin’s name as he ostensibly criticizes him, but it’s not even clear he’s speaking of Putin. Who is the “they” in “they didn’t know what to do”? The Kremlin, or the Biden administration (who Trump has repeatedly said, wrongly, was caught flat-footed by events in Ukraine)? When Trump then suddenly pivots to trying to criticize Biden—perhaps unnerved at how close he had just come to unambiguously criticizing Putin—it becomes even more unclear who the “‘em” (“them”) was in Trump’s aborted, incoherent sentence, “We wouldn’t have even had to give ‘em.” Either Trump is seeking to disperse Putin’s poor decisions and criminal actions across an unnamed “them” while criticizing Biden by name (in which case he is saying, in effect, “[If I were president], we wouldn’t have even had to…”) or else he is doing something even more stunning: using the first-person plural pronoun (“we”) to equate to Russia, in which case the “‘em” (“them”) refers to the Ukrainians.

Truthfully, it’s impossible to tell what Trump is saying, as his words are nonsensical.

While it certainly appears that the “he” in the second half of Trump’s statement refers to Putin, Trump resolutely refuses to say Putin’s name, and in fact compliments Putin by saying that the Russian dictator had created the structure for a “great negotiation”, then pulling back hard on his description of the Russian invasion as a “big mistake” by concluding, far less harshly, that things simply “didn’t work out too well” for Putin despite his “great” opening maneuvers. When the former president suddenly pivots to “Biden”, it underscores that when Trump actually wants to criticize someone he names them; when he doesn’t want to criticize, he lapses into obfuscation and the ambiguous use of pronouns.

And yet, in a certain way, Trump is actually—if inadvertently—telling the truth above.

Neither he nor Putin appeared to believe, during Trump’s first term, that an all-out ground war in Ukraine would be necessary for Putin to bring Ukraine back under the Kremlin’s thumb. The “peace deal” the Kremlin had sent to Trump through various intermediaries would have achieved Putin’s short-term goals—the annexation of a good portion of Ukraine and an end to sanctions on Russia—and would have achieved some of what Putin wanted long-term without a full-scale invasion of eastern Europe.

Indeed, Russia now claims that its primary mission in Ukraine was always consistent with the terms of the “peace deal” ferried to Michael Flynn through a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian member of parliament and Michael Cohen in early 2017: namely, the theft of Crimea and the Donbas region, and some sort of demilitarization and/or neutrality concessions from Kyiv. So even in criticizing Putin (if the alphabet soup in the block-quote above can be called criticism), Trump is saying little more than that if he had remained president, Putin would’ve had better options than war—which is likely true.

A No-Conflict Humanitarian Zone in Ukraine

In the early hours of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, Proof took the position—one now taken, too, by nearly every military analyst (including former high-ranking U.S. soldiers) appearing on CNN and MSNBC—that while NATO cannot risk helping to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as doing so would invariably bring NATO into direct military contact with Russian forces on the ground and in the air, NATO must help Poland get MiG-29s to the Ukrainian Air Force by allowing a base in Germany to serve as the pick-up site for the transaction. While this idea was still hotly debated at the time Proof first wrote about it, not only have events in the interim underscored the validity of the central thesis proffered by Proof—that the West must go “all in” on aiding Ukraine’s defense—it is striking to see, now, how military analysts are publicly going much farther than Proof has in advocating for NATO involvement in the Russia-Ukraine War.

In the last week, an increasingly common refrain among military analysts on both CNN and MSNBC has been that NATO should establish the entire western half of Ukraine as a “no-conflict humanitarian zone” patrolled by land and air with NATO forces. Such a zone—positioned where no Russian land forces presently are (though Russian missiles have recently landed in the proposed zone)—would offer a safe haven for refugees from eastern Ukraine while also ensuring that Putin will have no hope of annexing the entirety of Ukraine. If such a strategy were pursued, the most Putin could hope for out of a “victory” in Ukraine would be annexing half of a nation that he already controls in notable part (7% pre-invasion, perhaps 12% now) via the presence of Russian forces or allies in the Donbas region, Crimea, and other parts of southern and eastern Ukraine; presumably, any humanitarian force NATO moved into western Ukraine would essentially become a permanent fixture in European geopolitics—a bulwark against later military aggression, at least in the direction of Poland, by Putin.

Needless to say, the potential dangers of this approach—which if it is being widely discussed in ex-military circles is almost certainly also being considered by the Biden administration on at least a preliminary basis—are considerable. It is fanciful, at best, to put a ring around an armed conflict and imagine that no missiles will fly over such an invisible boundary-line, or that no armed Russian regulars will cross its ideational demarcation, or that the expanding Ukrainian military theater will stay tame enough to never encroach upon a temporary-cum-permanent NATO protectorate covering half of Europe’s largest country. While the idea certainly has its merits, and may soon be one this journalist and others see the benefit in, it will no doubt be the subject of significant debate within the United States throughout 2022—as it is not likely to be the sort of maneuver NATO would undertake without weeks or months of planning.

On the “pro-” side of the debate, advocates will note that the refugee crisis in Ukraine is Europe’s worst since World War II, and that the nations bordering Ukraine can no longer absorb the flood of displaced persons they are now receiving on a daily basis.

Moreover, even those internally displaced persons in Ukraine headed toward a nation with room for additional refugees—or planning to stay only temporarily in a receiving country that’s now “full” before moving farther west—may find it impossible to get as far as their nation’s western border in the middle of a land war. A humanitarian zone protected by NATO would halve (or more) the distance refugees must travel to safety, and the importance of this can’t possibly be understated—especially if we consider how many of the refugees are kids, the elderly, pregnant women, men or women with serious health problems, the physically challenged, or others with a mobility in some way contingent or compromised.

As importantly, advocates for a no-conflict humanitarian zone will note that it halves the theater of war. This would not only protect half of Ukraine from the devastations of war—in terms of both civilian casualties and damaged infrastructure—but it would also ease the work of the Ukrainian Armed Forces considerably, as they could now strategize their response to Russian aggression knowing that (a) their western flank is safe, and (b) the amount of ground they must hold or retake is considerably less than it was previously. While no one in the West would describe a no-conflict humanitarian zone as a military maneuver, in practical terms it is indeed an aggressive rather than merely reactive tactic. Its impact on the Kremlin’s ability to meet mission objectives would be profound; it stands a chance of turning the tide of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Those opposing a no-conflict humanitarian zone would likely to make just this point.

It will hardly be lost on Vladimir Putin, who has already threatened the world with nuclear war if his military adventurism is in any way thwarted by NATO, that the erection of a NATO protectorate in western Ukraine would effectively place NATO in the middle of “his” military theater. While it is true that NATO is already openly arming Ukraine with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles, and small arms—and that it’s precisely these weapons that have allowed Ukraine to hold firm against Russia’s invasion so far—and while it’s true that the establishment of a no-conflict humanitarian zone in western Ukraine wouldn’t change the way this core fact has operated thus far in eastern Ukraine, no one who understands warfare doubts that covering the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ rear with thousands and thousands of NATO troops is also a military maneuver that aids those armed forces immeasurably.

So how would Putin react if NATO moved into western Ukraine? Would he engage with NATO forces militarily, knowing that (short of nuclear war) he cannot hope to defeat NATO forces on the field of battle, indeed can’t even defeat Ukrainian forces operating alone? Would he exponentially increase the brutality of his attacks on civilian targets in eastern Ukraine, switching from using exclusively conventional weapons to deploying chemical and biological ones as well? Would he take NATO’s action as an implicit sign that he will be permitted by NATO to eventually annex the whole of eastern Ukraine? Will he respond by expanding his current project—bringing foreign soldiers en masse into eastern Ukraine—to encompass more troops from the Middle East or even Asia, thereby escalating immeasurably both the temperature and global implications of the conflict? Or would Putin, knowing that NATO would need weeks or months to fully establish such a zone, view even the mere prospect of it as an excuse to send 100,000 more Russian troops into Ukraine with the mission of quickly and brutally taking the western half of the country? Right now the Russian strategy in Ukraine is failing; does NATO want to take an action that might prompt the Kremlin to reconsider, wholesale, its current theater-wide tactical follies?

There may well be a middle ground. The mere threatening of a no-conflict zone could give NATO the rhetorical cover it needs to do something vital but less invasive: allow the transshipment of Soviet-era aircraft to Ukrainian pilots who know how to fly MiG-29s. It could even provide cover for the U.S. to do what Ukrainian officers have started asking America to do: send American planes to Ukraine, a complex proposition given that American military trainers would likely have to accompany these planes to help instruct Ukrainian pilots (who fly Russian-made jets) in how to use them. Yet if Putin believes NATO is seriously considering assuming active control over half the territory he seeks to annex, he may react less mercurially to lesser forms of NATO involvement.

The reason I address the question of a no-conflict humanitarian zone in an article on Donald Trump’s relationship with Ukraine is because, in all ways that matter, Trump is on the ballot in November of 2022. As discussed in additional detail below, he has the support in 2024 (if he wants it) of almost every elected Republican official nationwide, so should American voters decide to bolster the political capital of the Republican Party in 2022, they cannot do so insensate to the fact that they are also—perhaps even immeasurably—increasing the odds that Mr. Trump becomes president again in 2024.

It is for this reason that the political debate America is about to enter into about what to do in Ukraine is so important to outline. The debate has been artificially forestalled by the geopolitical shock Putin’s invasion caused America and the world, despite the fact that most analysts expected something like this was coming long ago—let alone when Putin began amassing a force of 150,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders. Yet the debate will kick into high gear once the midterm primary season is over and GOP and Democratic candidates begin tilting at one another in full force here at home; in many races, a Donald Trump-endorsed far-right radical will have become the GOP nominee through the auspices of Trump personally and his massive fundraising apparatus, and we can expect that such candidates will be proxies for Trump’s generally pro-Kremlin sensibility. We have already seen, here in 2022, top Trump congressional allies like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) launch obscene broadsides against Ukraine and those here at home who’d support that beleaguered nation. Such attacks will only increase in number, volume, and obscenity as Trump’s handpicked nominees seek to curry favor with a man who is himself seeking to curry favor with Putin in advance of the 2024 presidential election cycle that begins in 2023.

And as Trump and his allies get closer to what they hope will be a GOP majority in Congress—and therefore closer to a sham pre-impeachment investigation of the U.S. president’s relationship with Ukraine—the impetus for the MAGA “movement” and its elected officials to take Putin’s part in the Russia-Ukraine War, and to urge Putin to release some sort of doctored or manufactured “evidence” again the Biden family, will only increase.

A Changing Tide

As recently as fifteen years ago, a common refrain in Washington was that “politics ends at the water’s edge.” Of course this is no longer true, and not merely because Donald Trump—as established, with 12,000 major-media sources, by the Proof trilogy—has now spent almost seven years politically and in some cases militarily colluding with enemies of America in Russia, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela. In fact, the main reason the old adage about “the water’s edge” is no longer true is because today’s American politicians believe en masse that no rhetoric is off-limits—indeed, no policy posture is off-limits—if it even arguably pushes them one iota closer to electoral victory. So we can expect that, in 2022, the war in Ukraine will become not merely a topic of universal concern from a humanitarian and military standpoint but a centerpiece of U.S. political debate.

Should this debate focus on the establishment of a no-conflict humanitarian zone in Ukraine, as it is likely to, it will present the Republican Party with a series of tactical challenges whose resolution is extremely difficult to predict. It would be easy enough for the pro-Kremlin components within the Republican Party—including disloyal anti-American ideologues like Greene and Cawthorn, venal opportunists like Mr. Trump, instinctive contrarians like Sens. Cruz and Rand Paul (R-KY), and those generally and perhaps even earnestly more concerned about future Russian aggression than present Ukrainian salvation—to declare that a humanitarian zone in Ukraine would invariably cost the lives of American soldiers in the medium-term and is therefore a non-starter.

These naysayers may even be right in their criticism, whatever their true motives are, which will make their protestations all the more compelling to moderate U.S. voters.

But the reality—as I argue in more detail in the following section—is that nothing the Republicans say in the heat of the 2022 midterm election cycle matters if they remain committed, as they are sure to (almost to a one) remain committed, to a second Trump presidential term beginning in January 2025. One cannot say that one wishes for a Putin ally to be America’s commander-in-chief at noon on January 20, 2025 and also claim that one’s views on the Russia-Ukraine war are aimed at frustrating Putin’s war crimes. To support Trump in 2024, as nearly all current elected Republicans do, is to not only support an active insurrection (we recently learned that Trump continues to lobby his allies in Congress to seditiously seek his return to power at any cost) but to support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because we’ve already seen how Trump responds, when president, to a Russian invasion of Ukraine: with across-the-board inaction at best, and aggression toward Ukraine at worst. Trump’s abiding contempt for Ukraine has positioned him on Putin’s side against our European ally again and again and again, and that is not set to change in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, or at any point thereafter if Trump—with the help of all those GOP elected officials who are up for re-election this year—returns to the White House and his public allyship with Putin.

So is a no-conflict humanitarian zone a good idea? This is a military question, and a humanitarian question, no matter how those on both sides of the American political aisle may try to position it as a political question throughout 2022. The reason it is not properly deemed a political question, however, is that there are now only two sides in the broader issue of who one supports in the Russia-Ukraine War: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin or Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelensky. Everything else is a matter of in situ tactics and logistics. This is not to say that the stakes of tactics and logistics are low—they never are—but rather that, even if a Republican you are considering voting for in 2022 takes the position you favor on the topic du jour in Ukraine (a no-conflict zone) it must be immaterial to your decision-making process as a voter because, quite simply, the Republican you’re evaluating has already made the only decision that will matter in the medium- and long-term: whether to support Trump’s re-election in 2024.

And whatever Donald Trump may say in 2022 or 2023 or 2024 about his views on a no-conflict humanitarian zone in Ukraine, we can be certain of one thing: once back in power he would do, as he has always done, whatever most aids Vladimir Putin and most harms Ukraine. Whether to enable Trump’s return to power, and Putin’s return to dominance atop America’s foreign policy considerations, is not just likely to be on the ballot in 2024, it is without question on the ballot in the midterm elections of 2022. If you ever doubted this, Trump’s latest “Russia, if you’re listening” plea for collusion with a hostile foreign nation and its autocratic leader should’ve evaporated any doubt.

2023 and 2024: Americans Vote to Determine Which Side of a World War the United States Will Take

Donald Trump has never won the popular vote in any election, and on the evidence of the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, the latter of which he lost among voters in an even greater landslide than the first, there is no evidence that Trump can win the popular vote in a U.S. election. With this in mind, there are two ways for Trump to guarantee that he will be a competitive candidate in 2024 if he seeks to again run for President of the United States—an effort Vladimir Putin will undoubtedly be even more invested in than he was when he authorized cyberattacks on the United States in 2016. Putin’s lifelong ambition of a reconstituted (but now autocratic) Soviet Union is even more clearly on the American ballot in 2024 than it was in 2016, given that Putin has now put all his cards on the table—the initiation of a nuclear war excepted—by launching a full invasion of the largest nation by land area on the European continent.

It is now more imperative than at any other time in post-Soviet Russian history that the Kremlin have a sympathetic ear and staunch ally behind the Resolute Desk. And no politician in U.S. history has been more squarely on Russia’s side than Donald Trump.

The first of the two illicit things Trump can do to best ensure his re-election to the White House is support the most draconian rollback of Americans’ voting rights in modern American political history, which is what he’s doing right now with the full-throated support of the entire Republican Party. To the extent the GOP is looking to take over Congress in the 2022 midterm elections and stands a good chance of doing so, it can accurately be said that the first of Trump’s two anti-American stratagems for returning to the Oval Office is being executed with the eager aid of the very politicians from the Republican Party who will be begging for votes from U.S. voters in 2022 (in some instances, the very same voters that they’re presently seeking to disenfranchise).

The second of the two illicit things Trump can do to help himself secure re-election is to in every way possible signal his friendship to the enemies of America most likely to—if sufficiently motivated to do so—interfere in America’s next presidential election: Russia, China, and North Korea. This second gambit is far more problematic than the first, as it requires publicly opposing or otherwise frustrating U.S. aid to Ukraine in the middle of a hot war in Europe—admittedly nothing new for Trump, as this is precisely what he did (as we’ve seen) for the whole of his presidency. The difference, now, is that this second gambit no longer has the support of many within the GOP.

Fortunately for Trump—and importantly for U.S. voters planning to vote in 2022 and 2024—lack of establishment support for Trump’s pro-Kremlin posture is immaterial.

Even Trump’s on-again, off-again critics in the Republican Party, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and former Trump Attorney General Barr, have said that they will not only vote for Trump in 2024 if he is the Republican candidate for president, but will seek to aid his election if Trump is their party’s nominee. Given that both men—and nearly every other elected official in the Republican Party, for that matter, including every U.S. senator, congressman, or congresswoman who has spoken on the issue—believes that the 2024 GOP presidential nomination is Donald Trump’s for the taking, it’s fair to say that advancing the reelection and/or election prospects of Republican candidates in 2022 equates to strengthening Trump’s hand should he run for president in 2024. In this respect, it matters not at all that in public statements and a handful of public votes Republican members of Congress have taken Ukraine’s part in its conflict with Russia; given that such individuals will be working to re-elect a “useful idiot” for the Kremin in 2024, this lip-service empathy for Kyiv is fundamentally unserious, practically meaningless, and risibly duplicitous.

As we saw between 2017 and 2021, and as you have seen recounted throughout this article, if Donald Trump becomes President of the United States in January of 2025 with the full-throated endorsement and enthusiastic aid of the Republican Party, it will mean nothing at all that many members of that political party exhibited comity with Ukraine in public statements in 2022, 2023, and 2024. As Volodymyr Zelensky would undoubtedly say if he were free of the political fetters that prevent him from doing so, any ally of Donald Trump in his quest to return to the Oval Office is a de facto ally of Vladimir Putin and therefore, unalterably, an enemy of all Ukrainians.

It’s for this reason that the account above is not primarily important as a history, but rather as a vision of events to come. If Americans go to the polls in November 2022 and November 2024 and believe themselves to be primarily deciding on domestic policy—an illusion that most Republicans will be at great pains to foster by seeking to eliminate any evident daylight between themselves and Democrats on Ukraine policy—they will have been duped into taking a side in an ongoing world war that they did not intend to take, and would certainly not have taken had they been fully apprised of the fact that they were doing so. Indeed, the only way for the Republican Party to take foreign policy off the table in the 2022 and 2024 presidential elections (and make no mistake, this is something it could readily do) would be to support efforts in Congress and in several states to invalidate Donald Trump as a 2024 presidential candidate on the grounds that he has fomented—and is now fomenting—sedition and insurrection.

Of course, as Proof has written in the past, the Republican Party’s leadership will not choose this course of action because it believes—likely accurately—that Trump now holds a gun to its head. If it betrays him, he will bolt the party and in so doing take approximately 70% of the Republican base with him. It’s for this simple reason that many Republicans will publicly make common cause with Ukraine in 2022, 2023, and 2024 even as they make preferential common cause with a U.S. politician indirectly at war with Ukraine and, through Trump, a Russian dictator literally at war with Ukraine.

So for all that the subheaders of this novella-length Proof article speak of “2017” and “2018” and “2019,” the fundamental significance of the events in the Trump-Ukraine timeline that took place in those years is that they forecast the invisible stakes of the next two American federal elections, which will not so much be the most important U.S. elections in U.S. history but possibly the most important U.S. elections in history, period.

The future of Europe, the future of the United States, and the future of Western-style democracy broadly writ is on the ballot when in 2022 and then 2024 America chooses between the Party of Trump and Putin on the one hand and the Party of Biden and Zelensky on the other. The war Trump waged on Ukraine from 2016 through the end of his presidency not only continues to this day—as recently as his statement within the last 24 hours that he would happily collude with Putin if it harmed America’s commander-in-chief as America sits at the precipice of the greatest military conflict since World War II—but would undoubtedly continue in a second Trump presidential administration. Such an administration would be even more unconstrained by the bounds of decency or even basic humanity than anything we have seen from Trump (or for that matter Putin) previously. A second Trump term would unfold against the backdrop of a world war, a European genocide, an organized insurrection inside the United States, a still-simmering global pandemic, a Kremlin-allied North Korea now capable of hitting the United States in a nuclear strike (a development that occurs against the backdrop of Putin having already publicly threatened a nuclear war on the eve of his second invasion of Ukraine) and the potential collapse of the EU and NATO.

Conclusion

In just the past two weeks, the Trump-pardoned Paul Manafort has met with Roger Stone in Florida and then tried to leave the country illegally to dialogue with unnamed persons in a “grand bargain” nation (the United Arab Emirates); Donald Trump has not only refused—despite being given countless opportunities to do so by one of his own former domestic policy advisers—to label Vladimir Putin evil or an adversary of the United States, but even begged for the Kremlin’s aid in defeating Biden politically; and top Trump congressional ally Marjorie Taylor Greene has recorded a pro-Kremlin propaganda video. Trump may make occasional, quickly self-squelched noises about weakening in his support for Putin—undoubtedly a product of the twice-impeached, one-term former president being temperamentally disinclined from associating with a loser—but Americans must not be fooled by such quickly discarded vacillations. To the extent Trump has criticized Putin over Ukraine following his initial assessment that the Kremlin strongman’s illegal invasion of Europe was “wonderful” and “smart,” his focus has been on mildly, even ambiguously critiquing Russia’s tactics. According to Trump, Vladimir Putin’s failure in Ukraine so far has been insufficient forcefulness, a diagnosis that ranks among the most obscene ever heard from a U.S. politician given our government’s official declaration last week that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine.

In his interview with Hannity, Trump vaguely described events in Ukraine as “sad”—again, a pivot from them being “savvy” that is exclusively attributable to the bad press Putin has gotten—but wouldn’t attach them to any particular foreign action, let alone any particular foreign actor. His most oft-repeated refrain, apparently intended to be simultaneously self-aggrandizing and prospectively comforting in view of his likely 2024 presidential campaign, is that Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have been inclined to go into Ukraine if Trump had won another term—likely again with Putin’s help—in 2020.

This may be true. As partnered aggressors against Ukraine, Trump and Putin have for years been reasonably effective at promoting self-defeating corruption in Ukraine’s government, destabilizing anti-corruption and pro-democratic efforts there, and bewildering the Ukrainian military through both military and bureaucratic gambits. The so-called “peace deal” that pro-Kremlin Ukrainians worked on for the whole of Trump’s presidency—a deal which would have given the Kremlin a sizable piece of Ukraine without any penalty, and likely would have evolved to include some of the demands regarding NATO, neutrality, and demilitarization we now hear from Putin—would surely have continued during a second Trump presidential administration, temporarily forestalling a second full military invasion of Ukraine by the Kremlin.

At the same time, Putin would have had no doubt about how Trump would respond to a full military invasion of Ukraine, as he had already invaded Ukraine prior to Trump entering politics, and had heard from Trump again and again and again that Russian incursions into Ukraine were seen by him as irrelevant to his domestic and foreign policy agendas. It’s not clear why Trump would have vocally opposed any sanctions on Russia for stealing Crimea but taken a different approach to Russia taking the Donbas or, for that matter, taking Kyiv and reinstalling just the sort of government Trump’s old friend, adviser, and campaign manager Paul Manafort had helped lead until 2014.

In short, Trump saying that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine on his watch is much like a psychopathically ravenous wild animal bragging that his habitat wouldn’t have experienced an overpopulation problem with creatures below him in the food chain had he simply been left in charge of the issue.

But we must consider, too, all that Donald Trump would have sought to extract from Ukraine if he had won reelection in 2020 and Ukraine had sometime thereafter come under even a limited military incursion and political annexation by Russia—say, in the Donbas region exclusively, which Trump already effectively conceded to the Kremlin with his declaration at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in July 2015. And we must consider this question in light of the grotesque extortions of the Ukrainian military that Trump authored between 2017 and 2020.

Today, we hear Trump describing as “wonderful” a Russian war crime that, had it happened on his watch, would’ve led to the very man he previously tried to shake down—Volodymyr Zelensky—begging for his aid in the face of Kremlin bombings of maternity hospitals, schools, playgrounds, and apartment blocks. What would Trump have sought to extract from Ukraine then, in view of his past efforts to partner with Putin to ruin that country? Business deals? Cash? More manufactured political dirt from Kremlin agents inside Ukraine’s government and energy industry? Perhaps, in the face of a Russian advance that threatened to end Ukraine permanently, Volodymyr Zelensky might have finally given Trump what he wanted—doctored evidence of crimes by Joe Biden. This is a depth of chaos and madness we can only imagine, now.

More likely than any of the above is the possibility that Trump would simply have parroted Putin’s demands of Ukraine, urging its demilitarization and devolution to a neutral state; its commitment never to join the EU or NATO; the overthrow of its democratically elected government and replacement with one more to the liking of the Kremlin; and the surrender of 15% of the land area of Europe’s largest nation to Russian annexation. It’s not speculation to imagine a second-term President Trump taking Putin’s part in this way; Trump’s public statements, pre- and post-election, offer a clear view of the alternate universe in which he’d won the 2020 presidential election rather than losing it in a clear popular vote and electoral-college landslide.

Yet it is necessary that we consider this alternate universe, given that Donald Trump will almost certainly run in the 2024 election cycle or (at best) select his successor after getting a series of pro-Kremlin foreign policy concessions from him or her in private.

Lest we forget, U.S. policy in Ukraine in 2025 effectively becomes American policy in Belarus and Moldova in 2027, in Georgia and Armenia in 2029, in Kazakhstan in 2031, and perhaps even the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) by the mid-2030s. There is no reason for America to take one view of war crimes and illegal annexations in Ukraine in 2022 and a different view of the same actions elsewhere in Europe or the former Soviet Union in the years to come. Putin knows this; Trump knows this; and as Trumpists inside the Republican Party begin openly courting Russian aid for the 2024 presidential election by backing Putin’s play in Ukraine, the notion that medium- and even long-term U.S. foreign policy in Europe and Asia is being formulated right now escapes precisely no one’s attention.

Putin has been at war with Ukraine for as long as he has been at war with the West: since he ascended to power in Moscow in 2000. And just as his war with the West has been waged largely through the promotion of global financial corruption, audacious interference in democratic elections, and the coordination of mass cyberterrorism, so too has most of his war with Ukraine featured these nefarious components. While it is easy to hope that Putin will draw the line at military force in his aggression against the West in a way that he has now opted not to draw this line with respect to Ukraine, it is better to understand the parallel tracks of Putin’s barbarous ambitions as being on different timelines than different scales or parameters. Ukraine is the canary in the coal mine of the fight against Western-style democracy that Putin, and now Trump, has been waging for years; if violence bring successes for Putin in Ukraine as it already has in Georgia and Chechnya (and in quelling domestic opposition to his transition of Russia from a democracy to an autocratic kleptocracy), this method will be exploited by Putin as a means of achieving results in other nations that happen to fall under the umbra of his avarice. Just so, if Donald Trump is now willing to not just condone and pardon but admire Putin’s use of violence in executing his designs, this willingness will surely continue in a second Trump presidential administration and extend not just to Putin’s war on Ukraine but his broader war on the West. Just as Trump now boasts that the United States would be spared from certain hostilities with Russia were he still in the White House, in the future we could expect him to give Putin essentially endless leash worldwide on the argument that doing so will ensure that the Kremlin always leaves America alone—until, of course, it doesn’t, as when Putin waged cyberwar against the U.S. to help ensure a Trump win in 2016.

And what works for Putin in Europe will be closely watched by Kim Jong-Un in North Korea—a man Trump exchanged “love letters” with, and whose nuclear ambitions the former president did precisely nothing to brook—and by Xi Jinping in China, the very man whose largesse with trademarks and other financial favors the Trumps have now enjoyed for many years (see the Trump-China chapter of Proof of Corruption for more).

We should hear every claim by Donald Trump that the war in Ukraine would not have happened on his watch with this dark future in mind, as it is a future that almost the whole of the Republican Party aims to speed America toward and with great dispatch. Not one Republican senator has promised to oppose Trump if he’s the GOP nominee in 24 months time, and any Republican member of the House who would’ve opposed Trump has (Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming excepted) has decided to retire, instead. It must therefore be said that the whole of the elected Republican party at the national level favors the continuation of Trump’s war against Ukraine—and his partnership with Vladimir Putin in waging that gruesome, evil war—beginning in January of 2025.

While January 2025 may seem like a long way off, not only is it under 36 months from now but it’s a mere blip in the decades-long scheme that Putin has unfurled to restore the former Soviet Union. When we speak of U.S. policy in Ukraine, we should be thinking not just of all that has happened since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 but of all Putin still has planned for the world in the 2030s and 2040s. While slightly older than Putin, Trump’s plans for Russia and for NATO seem otherwise fully aligned to Putin’s—with the exception of the former including Trump buildings rising up across Russia and the former Soviet states (we can safely assume Putin would be, under other circumstances, quite indifferent to this development).

It’s morbid to speak of a politician’s immediate post-death legacy while that politician is still alive. But whensoever Donald Trump should pass on from natural causes, we must understand that there will be those ready and willing to carry on his and Putin’s plans into the world’s medium-term future—whether it’s Trump Jr. or Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner or Mike Pompeo, Kristi Noem or Nikki Haley, Cruz or Ron DeSantis or Josh Hawley or another enthusiastic Trumpist who slowly comes to be encircled, as Trump now has been for years, by Kremlin agents. Russia’s support for the Republican Party won’t end when Trump does, just as the Democratic Party’s enmity for Kremlin military aggression in Europe and cyberattacks on the United States is now unyielding.

It is time for Americans to make a choice: either the future of America and much of the world will be determined by Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Republican Party, or it will be under the aegis of America, NATO, the European Union, and all those worldwide who love rule of law, sustained peace among nations, and democracy.

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