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What Bolton's manuscript meant for Ukraine's aid
Summary
A retrospective on a reported account of why US military aid to Ukraine was frozen, as it stood in late January 2020.
What did a leaked manuscript add to the question of why US military aid to Ukraine was frozen? On 29 January 2020, the matter was still being discussed after reports, dated 26 January 2020, about an unpublished manuscript of The Room Where It Happened, a book by former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
According to those reports, the manuscript said President Donald Trump told Bolton that unfreezing military aid to Ukraine depended on Ukraine carrying out investigations into Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
Why it mattered for Kyiv
The account bore directly on the 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal. That scandal arose from attempts to press Ukraine to investigate Biden, a political rival of Trump and a contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Trump blocked payment of a congressionally mandated $400 million military aid package, in what was described as an effort to obtain quid pro quo cooperation from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The scandal's 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 reported content linked the aid freeze explicitly to the investigations, which is the connection at the centre of the scandal.
