Leaders fortified Trump’s Ukraine view
Russia’s Putin and Hungary’s Orban reinforced president’s perception of Ukraine as corrupt country, officials said.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine for information he could use against political rivals came as he was being urged to adopt a hostile view of that country by its regional adversaries, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, current and former U.S. officials said.
Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials said.
Neither of those foreign leaders specifically encouraged Trump to see Ukraine as a potential source of damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, nor did they describe Kyiv as complicit in an unsubstantiated 2016 election conspiracy, officials said.
But their disparaging depictions of Ukraine reinforced Trump’s perceptions of the country and fed a dysfunctional dynamic in which White House officials struggled to persuade Trump to support the fledgling government in Kyiv instead of exploiting it for political purposes, officials said.
The role played by Putin and Orban, a hard-right leader who has often allied himself with the Kremlin’s positions, was described in closed-door testimony last week by George Kent, a deputy assistant secretary of state, before House impeachment investigators, U.S. officials said.
Kent cited the influence of those leaders as a factor that helped sour Trump on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the months leading up to their July 25 phone call — a conversation that triggered a whistleblower complaint as well as a House impeachment inquiry.
U.S. officials emphasized that while Putin and Orban denigrated Ukraine, Trump’s decision to seek damaging material on Biden was driven by Trump’s own impulses and Kyiv conspiracy theories promoted by his attorney Rudy Giuliani.
In their May phone call, Putin “did what he always does” in seeking to undercut the United States’ relationship with Ukraine, said a former U.S. official familiar with details of the conversation. “He has always said Ukraine is just a den of corruption.”
The efforts to poison Trump’s views toward Zelenskiy were anticipated by national security officials at the White House, officials said. But the voices of Putin and Orban took on added significance because of the departure of those who had sought to blunt the influence of Putin and other authoritarian leaders over Trump.
In his testimony, Kent indicated that U.S. officials were encouraged by Trump’s initial phone call with Zelenskiy after his April election and hoped the president would see the new leader as a potential partner in long-standing U.S. efforts to help Ukraine fend off Russian aggression and battle internal corruption.
Instead, Kent testified, Trump’s view of Zelenskiy and Ukraine seemed to sour in the ensuing months, with Trump voicing disdain for Kyiv, ordering the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine removed, blocking Vice President Mike Pence from attending Zelenskiy’s inauguration and suspending the flow of $391 million in military and other aid to the country.
Trump spoke with Putin by phone and met with Orban at the White House in the weeks between Zelenskiy’s April 21 election and his May 20 inauguration. Trump also spoke with Putin on June 28, during a global summit in Japan, and by phone July 31, days after the call in which he solicited a “favor” from Zelenskiy.
The May visit from Orban began with an hourlong meeting between Trump and the Hungarian leader with no note-takers, officials said. Then-national security adviser John Bolton and the Hungarian foreign minister joined afterward.
Senior U.S. diplomats said they had limited insight into the private conversation between Trump and Orban. But one official said that it became “clear that the meeting with Orban had solidified” Trump’s pessimistic view about Kyiv and Zelenskiy.
Orban’s grievances toward Ukraine are grounded in a historic border dispute and the claimed mistreatment of a Hungarian-speaking minority that resides in Ukraine. But Orban’s animosity toward Zelenskiy is also ideological, officials said, noting that Zelenskiy has positioned himself in opposition to Orban as a Western-leaning reformer.