Trump thought US troops were in Ukraine in 2017,
ex-ambassador says in book
Marie Yovanovitch, who was fired by Trump in 2019,
reveals details of then president’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian
counterpart
Martin
Pengelly
@MartinPengelly
Fri 11 Mar
2022 16.37 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/11/donald-trump-ukraine-crimea-russia-poroshenko-book
At an Oval
Office meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in 2017,
Donald Trump asked his national security adviser if US troops were in Donbas,
territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists, which Vladimir Putin last
month used as pretext for a full and bloody invasion.
Describing
the meeting in a new book, the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie
Yovanovitch, writes: “An affirmative answer to that question would have meant
that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia.”
Yovanovitch
adds: “I pondered whether it was better to interpret Trump’s question as
suggesting that the commander-in-chief thought it possible that US troops were
fighting Russia-led forces, or instead as an indicator that the president
wasn’t clear which country was on the other side of the war against Ukraine.
“Either
way, it was disconcerting that he did not seem to know where we had our troops
– his troops – deployed. I could only imagine what the Ukrainians were
thinking.”
Trump fired
Yovanovitch in 2019, amid attempts to withhold military aid to Ukraine in
return for political dirt on Joe Biden and other rivals, an affair which fueled
Trump’s first impeachment.
Yovanovitch
describes the Trump-Poroshenko meeting in Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir,
which will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
The book
comes three weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which followed years of
proxy warfare in the east of the country.
Yovanovitch
also writes that Trump told Poroshenko Ukraine “was a corrupt country, which he
knew because a Ukrainian friend at Mar-a-Lago had told him”.
Trump, she
says, also said: “Crimea was Russian, as the locals spoke Russian”.
Russia
annexed Crimea in 2014, a move never recognized by the international community.
Yovanovitch writes that Trump’s words were “surprising enough to hear from one
head of state to another” but Trump topped them by asking his national security
adviser, HR McMaster, whether US troops were in Donbas.
“Everyone
kept a poker face on,” she writes.
Echoing
descriptions of Trump’s favored working techniques by multiple close aides,
Yovanovitch says Poroshenko deployed “visual aids, which Trump really liked” as
he “ably pushed back” and made his case for support.
Poroshenko
requested the inclusion of Javelin anti-tank missiles in a package of security
aid. Trump seemed open to the idea, Yovanovitch writes. In 2019, however, news
broke of his attempt to withhold military aid and secure dirt on Biden.
Yovanovitch’s
book comes as Poroshenko’s successor, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, leads his country’s
fight against Russian invaders, his forces using US-supplied Javelins and other
weapons sent by allies.
The
Poroshenko meeting was brief and forms a small part of a book which tells
Yovanovitch’s story of machinations involving Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney,
which led to her firing and Trump’s impeachment.
But her
description of the meeting echoes others by sources including John Bolton,
McMaster’s successor as national security adviser, which have shown Trump
risking embarrassment and mishap when one-on-one with world leaders.
Trump’s
ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, recently revealed that Trump risked
disaster in an early meeting with his counterpart Reuven Rivlin, when he
praised the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and criticized Benjamin Netanyahu,
then the Israeli prime minister, for being unwilling to seek peace.
Trump’s
comments “knocked everyone off their chairs”, Friedman wrote.
Participants
in the meeting with Poroshenko appear to have stayed seated.
Yovanovitch
writes that she sensed “Trump had come into the meeting viewing Ukraine as a
‘loser’ country, smaller and weaker than Russia”, only to be “a little
surprised by Poroshenko”, who was “as physically imposing as Trump” and who was
also “a billionaire businessman”.
After the
meeting, Trump said Ukraine was “a place that everybody’s been reading about”.
Poroshenko told reporters he was “satisfied with the results of the
negotiations”, and said the two leaders discussed military and technical
cooperation.
Yovanovitch
“hoped that Poroshenko had created the kind of favorable impression that would
make Trump rethink his views of Ukraine and its importance to our strategic
interests”.
However,
she adds, “Trump’s obsequiousness toward Putin was a frequent and continuing
cause for concern”.
In 2018,
Trump staged an infamous summit with Putin in Helsinki at which the two men
spoke in private for close to two hours. Trump’s “toadying up” to Putin at the
press conference which followed, Yovanovitch writes, made her lose her
appetite.
“When the
Ukrainian media called,” she writes, “… we took the opportunity to reinforce
the point that US policy was to help Ukraine defend itself against Russian
aggression”.
Five years
on from Trump’s meeting with Poroshenko, with Ukraine in a fight for its
existence, Trump seems not entirely to have shed his suspicion that US troops
could be in the country – a step the Biden administration has made clear will
not be taken, given the potentially huge cost of confrontation with Russia.
Last month,
Trump appeared to misunderstand a Fox News host, to the extent of believing
Americans troops had landed in Ukraine.
“You
shouldn’t be saying that, because you and everybody else shouldn’t know about
it,” the former president said, seemingly mistaking reports of Russian troop
movements for US ones. “They should do that secretly, not be doing that through
the great Laura Ingraham.”
“No, those
are the Russians,” Ingraham corrected him.
“Oh, I
thought you said that we were sending people in,” Trump said. “That’ll
be next.”
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