Zelensky felt pressure before presidency
KYIV, Ukraine: More than two months before the phone call that launched the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, Ukraine’s newly elected leader was already worried about pressure from the US president to investigate his Demo
Volodymyr Zelensky gathered a small group of advisers on May
supposed to be about his nation’s
Instead, the group spent most of the three- hour discussion talking about how to navigate the insistence from Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for a probe and how to avoid becoming entangled in the American elections, according to three people familiar with the details
They spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivity of the issue, which has
The meeting came before Zelensky was inaugurated but about two weeks after Trump called to offer his congratulations on the night of the Ukrainian leader’s
The full details of what the two leaders discussed in that Easter Sunday phone call have never been publicly disclosed, and it is not clear whether Trump explicitly asked for an investigation of
The three people’s recollections differ on whether Zelensky specifically cited that first call with Trump as the source of his
But their accounts all show the Ukrainian president- elect was wary of Trump’s push for an investigation into the former vice president and his son Hunter’s
Either way, the newly elected leader of a country wedged between Russia and the US-aligned North Atlantic Treaty Organization democracies knew early on that vital military support might depend on whether he was willing to choose a side in an
A former comedian who won office on promises to clean
major foreign policy test came not from his enemy Russia, but rather from the country’s most
two of his top aides, Andriy Yermak and Andriy Bogdan, the
Also in the room was Andriy
owned natural gas company Naftogaz, and Amos Hochstein, an American who sits on the Ukrainian company’s superviso
diplomat who advised Biden on Ukraine matters during the