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Two Ukraine stories colliding on 2 October 2019
Summary
A look back at a day when Kyiv's Donbas diplomacy and the Washington impeachment inquiry unfolded side by side.
What did Ukraine agree to, and what was Washington saying about it, on 2 October 2019? The day sat between two separate storylines that both touched Kyiv.
The first was diplomatic. On 1 October 2019, Ukraine agreed to the so-called Steinmeier formula, a proposal aimed at granting special self-governing status to parts of Donbas and organising elections validated by the OSCE and held under Ukrainian law. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky replied to a letter from Martin Sajdik, answering that Ukraine agreed the text of the formula, which gives special status to what the letter called "separate territories" of Donbas.
The step belonged to the long effort to end the Donbas war. That effort had run through the Minsk agreements, a series of international deals meant to stop fighting between Russian-backed separatist groups and Ukraine's armed forces. Talks in Minsk involved a Trilateral Contact Group of Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE, with France and Germany mediating in the Normandy Format. The first Minsk Protocol was signed in September 2014.
Washington's parallel drama
The second storyline played out in the United States. On 2 October 2019, the office of Representative Adam Schiff said that a whistleblower, who had filed a complaint over a phone conversation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Zelensky, had sought guidance from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence before filing. The office denied that the committee had seen the complaint in advance.
The day before, on 1 October 2019, Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani hired Jon Sale, a prosecutor from the Watergate scandal, to represent him in the impeachment inquiry into the president.
Why the two threads matter together
Taken together, the dates show Kyiv working on a settlement formula for Donbas at the very moment a call involving its president was at the centre of a U.S. impeachment inquiry. One thread concerned the terms for the east of the country; the other concerned how the U.S. Congress would examine the conversation between the two presidents.
For readers looking back, the pairing is a reminder that in early October 2019 Ukraine was a subject of both peace diplomacy and American domestic politics, with each moving on its own track.
