What did the Bolton manuscript reveal about Ukraine aid?

What did the unpublished manuscript of John Bolton's book, The Room Where It Happened, say about military aid to Ukraine? By 30 January 2020, the question was already in circulation: as reported on 26 January 2020, the manuscript of the former National Security Advisor said President Donald Trump had told him that unfreezing the aid was conditional on Ukraine carrying out investigations into Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.

The account bore directly on the 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal. That affair arose from efforts to press Ukraine into investigating Biden, Trump's political rival, and so potentially damage Biden's campaign for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

The aid at the centre

The money at issue was a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package. Trump blocked its payment in an attempt to obtain quid pro quo 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.

Why it mattered

The manuscript's account was notable because it tied the aid freeze explicitly to the investigations. For Kyiv, the matter was one of security support held up amid a dispute in American domestic politics. The reported content of the manuscript placed that link in the president's own words, as relayed by his former security adviser.