"It was a panic" inside Zelensky administration after initial news broke of aid being withheld
I posted this yesterday but am posting it again today under a different subject heading because I think it is really important. This is a must read. Impeccable timing RE impeachment. I hope Rachel or someone picks it up. Much more at link. Directly contradicts Trump's "no pressure" narrative and shows just how much pressure Ukraine was under.
And Ukraine is losing good people over this too; not just us.
Oleksandr Danylyuk (former chairman of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council) says the requests to investigate the Bidens “rattled” Zelensky’s team and the one person in the administration he trusted was Bolton.
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"But in the weeks and months that followed, efforts to construct a partnership between the Zelensky and Trump administrations, one focused on fighting corruption, crumbled. It crumbled in part because the Zelensky team was pulled into an American domestic political fight spurred by Trump’s push to have Ukraine investigate his rival Joe Biden, Biden’s son Hunter, and supposed interference in the 2016 election. That’s according to Oleksandr Danylyuk, the former chairman of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, who said the requests “rattled” Zelensky’s team.
Danylyuk spoke to The Daily Beast last week in his first on-the-record conversation since impeachment proceedings began in Washington, saying he resigned from his post in Kyiv in September in part “because of the situation with the U.S.” When Danylyuk answered my FaceTime call, he appeared to be in his office in Kyiv, with pictures of the city in the background. The former Ukrainian official was supposed to have traveled to the U.S. to meet me but caught a virus at the World Economic Forum in Davos and flew home to recover. (We plan on meeting in person for our second interview.)
Over the course of two hours, Danylyuk laid out his reasons for joining the Zelensky team and why he decided to leave the administration. The former official said his hope was that he would get to “change lives” as a part of the Zelensky government, helping develop Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions and promoting the country as an international powerhouse worthy of respect. Danylyuk, a self-described technocrat, said the U.S.-Ukraine shakeup “set an uncomfortable background” but that the two countries can still forge ahead with a new, better roadmap.
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Danylyuk said he first found out that the U.S. was withholding aid to Ukraine by reading Politico’s article published Aug. 28. U.S. officials and Ukrainian diplomats, including the country’s former Foreign Minister Olena Zerkal, have said publicly that Kyiv was aware there were problems with the U.S. aid as early as July.
“I was really surprised and shocked. Because just a couple of days prior to that… I actually had a meeting with John Bolton. Actually, I had several meetings with him. And we had extensive discussions. The last thing I had expected to read was an article about military aid being frozen,” Danylyuk said. “After that... I was trying to get the truth. Was it true or not true?”
Danylyuk said that “it was a panic” inside the Zelensky administration after the initial news broke, saying Zelensky was convinced there had been some sort of mistake. Danylyuk put in calls to the National Security Council and asked other officials in Washington what to make of the news.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/oleksandr-danylyuk-former-top-ukraine-official-says-he-trusted-john-bolton-more-than-anyone?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
Let's watch for that upcoming in-person second interview with Daily Beast and Danylyuk.
= new reply since forum marked as read
