‘No Blackmail’ in Phone Call With Trump- President Zelensky
Ukraine’s
president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said on Thursday that President Donald Trump did
not seek to blackmail him over military aid when the two leaders spoke this
summer during a telephone call that has formed the basis of an
impeachment inquiry in the United States.
Speaking at
a marathon news conference at a food court in Kiev, Mr. Zelensky said that he
was not aware at the time of the call that Mr. Trump had put a hold on
nearly $400 million in promised military aid and that the topic had
not come up.
“There was
no blackmail,” Mr. Zelensky said. “They blocked the military aid before we had
our conversation, but we did not discuss it. Later we discussed it with the
defense minister and he said, ‘we have a problem, they’ve blocked this money.’”
Mr. Zelensky
also said he “didn’t care what happens” in the case of Burisma, the Ukrainian
gas company that once employed a son of former vice president Joseph R. Biden
Jr. In the phone call, President Trump had asked Mr. Zelensky to do him a
“favor” and investigate the debunked theory that Mr. Biden had directed Ukraine
to fire an anti-corruption prosecutor who had his sights on the company.
A top
Ukrainian prosecutor said last week that his office would review the
Burisma case along with more than a dozen other corruption investigations that
were conducted or closed by the previous government of President Petro O.
Poroshenko.
Mr. Zelensky
later added that he would “happily” direct prosecutors to look into whether
Ukrainians interfered in the 2016 United States presidential election.
President Trump has long maintained that off-the-books payments to his former
campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, for work he did in Ukraine were revealed by
Ukrainians in order to help the Clinton campaign.
Mr. Trump’s
decision to delay the release of the military aid is one of the central
questions in the impeachment inquiry being pursued by Democrats in the House of
Representatives.
At issue is whether Mr. Trump sought to use the assistance as
leverage to pressure Mr. Zelensky’s new government to open investigations into
Mr. Biden, one of the president’s leading opponents in the 2020 election.
At the time,
some officials, including the acting United States ambassador to Ukraine,
raised alarm over the decision, suggesting the aid and a possible meeting
between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky at the White House were being used to strong
arm the Ukrainian government.
“Are we now
saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on
investigations?,” the acting ambassador, William B. Taylor Jr., said in a text
message to another ambassador that was published as part of the impeachment
inquiry.
If that was
the intended message, Mr. Zelensky does not seem to have received it. The
Ukrainian president said that after he became aware of the issue, he raised it,
first with Vice President Mike Pence at a meeting in Poland and then with Mr.
Trump directly during a meeting at the United Nations in September.
“After our
meeting the United States unblocked it and added an additional $140 million,”
he said.
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