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Bolton manuscript reignites Ukraine aid question
Summary
A look back at 1 February 2020, as reports of an unpublished Bolton manuscript kept attention on the freezing of US military aid to Ukraine.
What did the White House want in return for Ukraine's military aid? On 1 February 2020, that question was still being pressed in Washington after reports, dated 26 January 2020, about an unpublished manuscript by John Bolton, the former National Security Advisor.
The manuscript, for his book The Room Where It Happened, reportedly said that President Donald Trump told Bolton that unfreezing the military aid to Ukraine depended 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 attempts to press Ukraine to investigate Biden, a rival of Trump in the race for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Trump had blocked payment of a $400 million military aid package that Congress had mandated. The aim, in the scandal's account, was to obtain cooperation from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Contacts between the White House and the Ukrainian government had culminated in a phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy on 25 July 2019.
For Kyiv, the reports of the manuscript meant that Ukraine's security assistance remained entangled in a US domestic political dispute.
