While the Democrats try to prove that US President Donald Trump blackmailed his Ukrainian colleague Vladimir Zelensky, the American leader is beginning to spread the story of Ukraine’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The presidential impeachment procedure has been officially launched in the United States. As was said by the member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Jim Himes in an interview with Fox News, open hearings will start in the next two or three weeks, i.e., November 17th-24th. According to the Reuters news agency, the day prior three employees of the White House Administration and Office of Management and Budget – acting director Russell Vought and his assistants Michael Duffy and Brian McCormack – refused to testify (speeches were planned for November 6th).
The Democrats have compiled an impressive list of witnesses in the impeachment case, including many ethnic Ukrainians whose testimonies may be important in the investigation.
The Ukrainian factor in Trump’s Impeachment
On October 10th and 11th the businessmen of Ukrainian origin Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas were supposed to answer the questions of the congressmen, but refused to take part in the internal political debate, and on a strange coincidence on the 9th they were detained on charges of illegally lobbying for the interests of a foreign state in the United States and violating the rules of financing electoral campaigns, but two days later they were released on bail. In addition, on October 14th the House of Representatives wanted to listen to another American businessman, Odessa-born Sam Kislin, who met the current President of the United States almost immediately after moving to the States in the 1970s. According to US media, in 1976 he sold a batch of TVs on credit for the Commodore Hotel (now Grand Hyatt New York), one of Donald Trump’s first business projects, and in the mid-2000s, along with other immigrants from the USSR, invested in another Trump project, the Trump SoHo hotel, now known as The Dominick.
Another ethnic Ukrainian – Alexander Vindman, director of Director for European Affairs National Security Council, who is described as the agency’s top expert on Ukraine – has already testified in a closed session, and became the first White House staffer to appear before Congress in an impeachment case. The politician who emigrated with his parents from Ukraine at the age of 3 said that during a conversation with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, American leader Donald Trump demanded that he investigate former US Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Russia and Ukraine are inseparable in the United States
While “Ukrainegate” is well under development in the United States, Trump himself has decided to return to Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation, which recently ended with a lack of evidence of the president’s ties to the Russian side. The head of state now wants to establish who defamed his name and ordered Special Prosecutor John Durham to find out on what basis the US competent authorities began a counter-intelligence investigation into his actions in 2016, as well as to establish the circumstances of the start of the Mueller investigation.
“It’s (US Attorney General – ed) Bill Barr and John Durham. And what they come up with will, I think, be very meaningful. We’ll see what happens. I do not get involved with it. That’s up to them,” said Trump to reporters on the lawn in front of the White House on November 3rd.
This investigation has been launched by the president for a reason – it could become a counter-bureaucratic weapon in his hands at an impeachment hearing in the Senate. The fact is that as early as 2017, Trump, who back then was not called an “agent of the Kremlin” out of laziness, accused the Democratic Party of colluding with Ukraine to collect dirt on him during the electoral campaign.
In recent days in the US media space reminders are actively offered concerning this well-forgotten story. On November 2nd the US Department of Justice, by a court decision that satisfied the claims of CNN and BuzzFeed News, published 500 pages of material, including interviews and e-mails related to Robert Mueller’s report, from which it was reported that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had been talking about Ukraine’s responsibility for the hacking of Democratic Party servers as early as summer 2016.
However, the attention of the American public was drawn much more to the documentary by journalist Glenn Lee Beck, a prominent critic of former President Barack Obama and his protégé in the last election, Hillary Clinton, former First Lady of the United States and former Secretary of State. For an hour he clearly explains via schematics how the US authorities influenced Ukraine’s domestic policy under Obama and how the Ukrainian factor affects US domestic policy in the context of Trump’s impeachment procedure. In particular, Beck recalls that during the 2016 election race the consultant of the National Committee of the Democratic Party of the American of Ukrainian origin Alexandra Chalupa met with senior representatives of the Ukrainian authorities at the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington to expose alleged ties between Trump and Manafort on the one hand, and Russia on the other.
Contrary to the view that foreign policy is of little concern to the population of the US, the journalistic investigation about Ukrainian-American ties gathered more than 1,100,000 views on YouTube in a month.
“In the United States, Russiagate and Ukrainegate are connected not only among the electorate, but also among Congress. Now they are asking for the full publication of Mueller’s report to prove that Trump abused his powers, meaning now the focus of the charges is exactly that formulation. This fact interconnects these two stories,” Aleksandr Borisov, a researcher at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations’ Center for North American Studies named after E.M. Primakov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said in comment to the ukraina.ru.
According to him, American citizens follow the news that they have at their disposal, especially in the media and on social networks, and people usually do not bother to find any alternative points of view, and this applies not only to the alternative outside the United States, but also to the limits of their thinking: Democratic supporters focus on news that scolded Trump, and Republican supporters derided people who scolded Trump.
“In my opinion, the only negative phenomenon promoted by the media is the constant scandalisation of Russiagate and Ukrainegate, which, on the one hand, allows them to keep the public in tension (everyone understands that these are prime times, money is earned from advertising), and on the other hand, people are taken away from the real problems that exist, first of all, in domestic politics. If you look at the Democratic campaign program, it’s just not there. There’s a year left before the election. If you look at Trump, the incumbent, lawfully elected president of the United States, he is being impeached, he has been under investigation since the day he took office. People treat it like a show, and it doesn’t come to anyone’s mind to ask the question ‘Guys, what are we going to do with our country? How are we going to run the economy? How will we solve social problems: problems at schools, problems with health care, problems with ecology?'” stressed the expert.
Thus, the 2020 election race in the US will become a struggle of Ukrainian dirt on presidential candidates – the one who will be able to prove that his opponent interfered in the internal affairs of Ukraine the most will receive additional points. But now no one recalls that the presence of the Americans in Ukraine has been constant, since the day of independence: it was the United States that drafted the legislation of the young state, and created its media and non-governmental organisations. However, Washington acted in this way in many countries, hiding behind the “establishment of democratic norms”.
In the fight for the minds and hearts of voters, candidates usually rely on promises to raise living standards, but American politicians, instead of thinking about the well-being of the population and solving the problems that have stood before the state (record public debt, holes in defence systems), prefer to involve other countries in an inter-party showdown.
Evgeniya Kondakova
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