What did Bolton's manuscript say about Ukraine aid?

What did an unpublished manuscript by John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor, reveal about military aid to Ukraine? On 27 January 2020, the question was at the centre of the 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal, a day after the manuscript's contents were reported on 26 January 2020.

According to the reports, the manuscript of Bolton's book, The Room Where It Happened, says President Donald Trump told him that unfreezing military aid to Ukraine depended on Ukraine carrying out investigations into Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.

The scandal behind the report

The scandal arose from Trump's attempts to press Ukraine to investigate his political rival Biden, which could have damaged Biden's campaign for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Trump had blocked payment of a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package. The aim, as later described, was to obtain cooperation from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Contacts between the White House and the Ukrainian government culminated in a phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy on 25 July 2019.

The manuscript's account linked the frozen aid directly to the investigations. For Ukraine, a country at war that relied on this military assistance, the reported conditionality placed its security funding at the heart of a dispute in Washington.