Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spent January 31 in Kyiv underscoring American support for Ukraine, including in its struggle against Russian aggression. While Pompeo brought no major deliverables, just showing up proved enough for the Ukrainians.

The U.S. government should now follow up with steps to strengthen the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, which has been stressed by President Donald Trump’s bid to drag Ukraine’s leadership into U.S. politics.

A ROUGH PATCH FOR U.S.-UKRAINE RELATIONS

2019 was not the best year for U.S.-Ukraine relations. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, elected in April, found himself pressured to launch an investigation into a long-discredited corruption claim about former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter, in order to benefit Trump’s reelection bid. In the process, the White House withheld an Oval Office visit from Zelenskiy and, for a time, congressionally-approved U.S. military assistance.

Zelenskiy managed to walk a narrow path carefully. He did not contradict Trump by saying there was pressure. Why would he? He and Ukraine had nothing to gain by alienating the American president. At the same time, authorities in Kyiv did not announce Trump’s desired investigation. Doing so would have unraveled the bipartisan support that Ukraine has enjoyed in Congress for nearly three decades.

Against this backdrop, the Ukrainians warmly welcomed the secretary of state’s visit. Pompeo, who had canceled planned visits in November and earlier in January, became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Kyiv in two-and-a-half years (Vice President Mike Pence reportedly was instructed by Trump not to attend Zelenskiy’s inauguration last May).

Kyiv was so eager to host Pompeo that Ukrainian officials overlooked the secretary’s faux pas a week before his arrival. In an interview with National Public Radio’s Mary Louise Kelly, Pompeo took umbrage when she raised Ukraine and questioned the secretary’s failure to speak up for U.S. officials called to testify in Trump’s impeachment hearings. An angry Pompeo asked: “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?”

THE RIGHT MESSAGES

Pompeo’s visit aimed to show Ukrainians — and Moscow — that Americans do care. As Kyiv think-tanker Alyona Hetmanchuk correctly predicted: “Pompeo will pretend that he didn’t say anything, and his Ukrainian counterparts will pretend that they didn’t hear anything.”

Pompeo had meetings with Zelenskiy, Foreign Minister Vadim Prystaiko, and Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk. The secretary had no major new announcements, but his public remarks following his meeting with Zelenskiy struck the right notes from the Ukrainian perspective:

• “The United States sees that the Ukrainian struggle for freedom, democracy, and prosperity is a valiant one. Our commitment to support it will not waver.”
• “We have maintained support for Ukraine’s efforts to join NATO and move closer to the European Union.”
• “In July of 2018, we released the Crimea Declaration, which clearly stated that Crimea is part of Ukraine and the United States will never recognize Russia’s attempts to annex it. We will never accept anything less than the full restoration of Ukraine’s control over its sovereign territory.”

In addition to meetings with Ukrainian officials, Pompeo laid a wreath in honor of Ukrainian soldiers who have died fighting Russian and Russian proxy forces the past six years in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. He later visited wounded soldiers.

The secretary’s words, wreath-laying, and hospital visit made the day a good one for Ukrainians anxious for reaffirmation of U.S. support. The only discordant note: The secretary ducked a question as to when Zelenskiy could visit Washington. Zelenskiy, who received an invitation from Trump last May, but no specific date, made clear his readiness to travel.

NEXT STEPS

Pompeo’s visit went some way to reassure Ukrainians. Never fully confident in Trump’s view of their country, they became more nervous about the depth and resilience of American support last fall as the impeachment drama played out in Washington. The U.S. government and Pompeo should follow up on his visit with steps to bolster the relationship and Ukraine’s confidence.

First, the president should quickly nominate an ambassador to Ukraine. Since Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s unjust early recall last spring, the U.S. mission in Kyiv has been led by chargés d’affaires. The current chargé is a very able and experienced career Foreign Service officer, but Ukrainians can be forgiven for thinking that the absence of a confirmed ambassador means that the United States does not care as much as it should.

Interestingly, during his February 1 visit to Belarus, Pompeo expressed hope that there would soon be an American ambassador in Minsk. Ukraine matters much more to U.S. policy interests than does Belarus. Pompeo should propose a name for Kyiv to the White House and urge the president to make a rapid decision.

Second, the secretary should task Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, who took up his office in early January, to devote some of his time to Russia and Ukraine. Deputy secretaries at the State Department typically have one or two regional questions in their direct portfolio. Biegun knows the post-Soviet region well. He spent time in Moscow during the 1990s. He is familiar with the Russia-Ukraine conflict, having taken part in a Track II effort to promote a settlement.

The State Department has indicated that it does not intend to replace Ambassador Kurt Volker, who resigned in September from his position as special envoy for Ukraine negotiations. The department apparently plans to have the slack taken up by diplomats such as Acting Assistant Secretary Phil Reeker, who has deep European experience, and Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent, who knows Ukraine as well as anyone at State. Adding Biegun to the mix would signal heightened U.S. interest in facilitating an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and ensure that Ukraine gets appropriate attention from the highest levels of the State Department.

Third, the secretary should ask Trump to give Zelenskiy a specific date to come to Washington. During his time in Kyiv, Pompeo denied that there were conditions for a visit — a denial that flies in the face of testimony to Congress by current and former U.S. officials. However, what better way to make the case than by extending an invitation for Zelenskiy to visit now?

Pompeo’s visit helped put U.S.-Ukraine relations on a better track. When he returns to Washington, he should take the above actions to further bolster that relationship.

Originally on Brookings

Ukraine unhappily found itself at the center of the impeachment drama that played out in Washington last fall and during the first weeks of 2020. That threatened the resiliency of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship, a relationship that serves the interests of both countries.

With Donald Trump’s impeachment trial now in the past, Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainians undoubtedly hope that their country will no longer feature so prominently in U.S. domestic politics. That would be good, but it may not happen.

Last year, Trump sought to get senior Ukrainian officials to announce an investigation of a political rival and extorted Kyiv to do so by withholding military assistance and a White House visit. Revelations of those actions led to the third presidential impeachment in American history. Last week, Republican senators voted to find Trump not guilty, disregarding damning testimony, rejecting further witnesses, and ignoring a courageous floor speech by their colleague Mitt Romney.

The impeachment hearings and trial proved a difficult time for Ukraine and for its friends in America. It had to be especially painful for Ukrainians to hear reports that the U.S. president referred to their country as a “terrible place” with “terrible people” and one of the “most corrupt countries.”

Impeachment is now over, but Ukraine may find itself again an object in U.S. politics, as America ramps up for the November presidential election.

Start with Trump. Rejecting the analysis of the U.S. intelligence community, State Department and Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, the president has bought fully into the Kremlin disinformation lie that it was Ukraine—not Russia—that interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “They [Ukrainians] tried to take me down.” Mr. Trump revels in playing the victim. As the campaign heats up, he almost certainly will depict himself as the victim of the “Ukraine hoax.” He will repeat the falsehood that the Ukrainian government organized an effort to sabotage his 2016 bid for the presidency.

If anyone believes Trump will let this go, or that the impeachment experience left him somewhat chastened, look at how he has behaved in the week since his acquittal.

Then there is Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who oversaw the effort to extort Kyiv. He wants to drag Ukraine into U.S. domestic politics. He continues pursuit of the discredited claim that former Vice President Joe Biden sought to have Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired to protect his son, and he is not going away. Attorney General William Barr said he would take information provided by Giuliani, even though Giuliani himself reportedly is under U.S. Department of Justice investigation.

In the Senate, Lindsey Graham plans to conduct hearings to investigate the Bidens and their connection to corruption in Ukraine. Mr. Graham, who has become one of the president’s biggest cheerleaders, seeks to boost Mr. Trump’s reelection prospects.

So Ukraine may find itself again enmeshed in American politics. How should Kyiv respond?

First, Zelensky and the Ukrainian government should keep walking that narrow path that they have walked successfully over the past five months: say or do nothing that would antagonize either Trump or Democrats in the Congress.

The Ukrainian president can continue to stay silent when Trump asserts that he said there was no pressure; Ukraine gains nothing by contradicting and alienating the U.S. president. By the same token, the Ukrainian government should not announce or launch bogus investigations, which would undermine the strong bipartisan support that Ukraine has enjoyed in both the House of Representatives and Senate for nearly three decades. This is a real asset for Ukraine, which should do nothing that would risk it.

Second, Kyiv should work to change the unflattering narrative that has taken hold in the United States. It has good news stories to tell. The Ukrainian government and Rada should work to get members of the House and Senate, particularly Republicans, to visit and see for themselves how the country is changing. Kyiv should send some of the bright young faces in government and Rada to Washington to tell their country’s story, not just in the halls of Congress but on CNN, PBS, Fox News and MSNBC.

Third, Ukraine’s political leadership should take steps that will reinforce the story of a country changing for the better, despite being the victim of Russian aggression: press the fight against corruption; enact and implement land reform; get back on program with the International Monetary Fund, which offers low-interest credits and a seal of approval that will help attract foreign investment.

After the last half-year, few in Ukraine presumably want their country again in the middle of American politics. If that nevertheless happens, Kyiv needs to position itself to avert damage to U.S.-Ukraine relations or to Ukraine’s image in the United States.

Steven Pifer, a William Perry research fellow at Stanford University, served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000.

Originally in the Kyiv Post

Speaking on Monday about Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, Ukraine’s foreign minister said “please don’t drag us into your [America’s] internal political processes.”  Unfortunately, Republicans appear intent on doing precisely that, as they repeat the false Russian claim that the Ukrainian government interfered in the 2016 US election.

Republicans see this as part of their effort to defend President Trump. In doing so, they put at risk America’s long-standing support for its Ukrainian partner.

The US government and large bipartisan majorities in Congress have backed Ukraine since the early 1990s, when it regained independence following the Soviet Union’s collapse. By the end of the decade, Congressionally-approved assistance for Ukraine had reached USD 300-400 million per year.

When Ukrainians took to the streets in the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity, their striving for democracy won interest and support from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill.

Such Congressional support offered Kyiv grounds for comfort when Trump became president in 2017. Candidate Trump had suggested he might recognize the illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia. He also questioned the sanctions imposed on Moscow for its seizure of Crimea and subsequent aggression in eastern Ukraine.

Despite Trump’s apparent skepticism about Ukraine and his reluctance to criticize Vladimir Putin (or Russian actions), Congress continued to back Ukraine. It regularly voted by wide margins to approve funding for reform and military assistance for Kyiv while pressing the administration to bolster sanctions on Russia.

Things took a turn last September with the revelation of Trump’s effort to extort Ukraine’s president into investigating his possible 2020 political opponent by withholding an Oval Office visit and military assistance. The president’s alleged abuse of power led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives in December.

I tried to assure my Ukrainian interlocutors that, whatever President Trump did, they had an ace in the hole: the bipartisan support their country enjoyed from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. This was support that, if necessary, would produce veto-proof votes to aid Ukraine. Today, I am not so sure.

It has long been clear that Trump buys Moscow’s disinformation line that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election. It is true that individual Ukrainian officials criticized candidate Trump, just as officials from many European countries did. But it was Russian intelligence agencies, with Putin’s approval, that hacked the Democratic National Committee’s e-mails and gave them to Wikileaks. It is Russia’s Internet Research Agency that used social media to sow division among Americans.

However, in November and December as they sought to defend Trump against impeachment, Republicans began to make the Russian argument that Ukraine had interfered. There were many examples of this from Republicans who will sit in judgment as the Senate conducts the impeachment trial. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) commented, “I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.” Meanwhile, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) argued, “There’s no difference in the way Russians put their finger early on, on the scale and how Ukrainian officials did it,” and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) stated bluntly, “Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election.”

We can expect more such charges in the coming days. Republicans have put themselves on a slippery slope as regards support for Ukraine.

Will Republicans who assert that the Ukrainian government interfered in the US election vote in the future to approve assistance for Ukraine? And, if they can separate their espousal of the Kremlin’s talking point from their votes on assistance, how do they defend to constituents and others less sympathetic to Ukraine a vote to assist the country that they say interfered in the 2016 US election?

This is dangerous ground that could undermine US support for a country whose success is in America’s national interest.

Steven Pifer, a William Perry research fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, is a former US ambassador to Ukraine.

Read the Rest at The Atlantic Council

Original written for Brookings.Com

Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, the United States has provided Ukraine with $3 billion in reform and military assistance and $3 billion in loan guarantees. U.S. troops in western Ukraine train their Ukrainian colleagues. Washington, in concert with the European Union, has taken steps to isolate Moscow politically and imposed a series of economic and visa sanctions on Russia and Russians.

The furor over President Donald Trump’s sordid bid to extort the president of Ukraine into investigating his potential 2020 political opponent raises an obvious question: Why should the United States care so much about Ukraine, a country 5,000 miles away? A big part of the reason is that U.S. officials told the Ukrainians the United States would care when negotiating the Budapest Memorandum on security assurances, signed 25 years ago this week.

A NUCLEAR-ARMED STATE BREAKS UP

In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the United States, Russia, and Britain committed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against the country. Those assurances played a key role in persuading the Ukrainian government in Kyiv to give up what amounted to the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, consisting of some 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads.

When the USSR broke up in late 1991, there were nuclear weapons scattered in the resulting post-Soviet states. The George H. W. Bush administration attached highest priority to ensuring this would not lead to an increase in the number of nuclear weapons states. Moreover, as it watched Yugoslavia break apart violently, the Bush administration worried that the Soviet collapse might also turn violent, raising the prospect of conflict among nuclear-armed states. Ensuring no increase in the number of nuclear weapons states meant that, in practice, only Russia would retain nuclear arms. The Clinton administration pursued the same goal. With the prospect of extending the Non-Proliferation Treaty indefinitely looming, an alternative course that allowed other post-Soviet states to keep nuclear weapons would have set a bad precedent.

Eliminating the strategic nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and strategic bombers in Ukraine was a big deal for Washington. The ICBMs and bombers carried warheads of monstrous size — all designed, built, and deployed to attack America. The warheads atop the SS-19 and SS-24 ICBMs in Ukraine had explosive yields of 400-550 kilotons each — that is, 27 to 37 times the size of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima. The 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads — more than six times the number of nuclear warheads that China currently possesses — could have destroyed every U.S. city with a population of more than 50,000 three times over, with warheads left to spare.

ASSURANCES FOR UKRAINE

Before agreeing to give up this nuclear arsenal, Kyiv sought three assurances. First, it wanted compensation for the value of the highly-enriched uranium in the nuclear warheads, which could be blended down for use as fuel for nuclear reactors. Russia agreed to provide that.

Second, eliminating ICBMs, ICBM silos, and bombers did not come cheaply. With its economy rapidly contracting, the Ukrainian government could not afford the costs. The United States agreed to cover those costs with Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction assistance.

Third, Ukraine wanted guarantees or assurances of its security once it got rid of the nuclear arms. The Budapest Memorandum provided security assurances.

Unfortunately, Russia has broken virtually all the commitments it undertook in that document. It used military force to seize, and then illegally annex, Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in early 2014. Russian and Russian proxy forces have waged war for more than five years in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas, claiming more than 13,000 lives and driving some two million people from their homes.

Some have argued that, since the United States did not invade Ukraine, it abided by its Budapest Memorandum commitments. True, in a narrow sense. However, when negotiating the security assurances, U.S. officials told their Ukrainian counterparts that, were Russia to violate them, the United States would take a strong interest and respond.

Washington did not promise unlimited support. The Budapest Memorandum contains security “assurances,” not “guarantees.” Guarantees would have implied a commitment of American military force, which NATO members have. U.S. officials made clear that was not on offer. Hence, assurances.

Beyond that, U.S. and Ukrainian officials did not discuss in detail how Washington might respond in the event of a Russian violation. That owed in part to then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin. He had his flaws, but he insisted that there be no revision of the boundaries separating the states that emerged from the Soviet collapse. Yeltsin respected Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity. Vladimir Putin does not.

U.S. officials did assure their Ukrainian counterparts, however, that there would be a response. The United States should continue to provide reform and military assistance to Ukraine. It should continue sanctions on Russia. It should continue to demand that Moscow end its aggression against Ukraine. And it should continue to urge its European partners to assist Kyiv and keep the sanctions pressure on the Kremlin.

Washington should do this, because it said it would act if Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum. That was part of the price it paid in return for a drastic reduction in the nuclear threat to America. The United States should keep its word.

What an American-Led Peace Plan Should Look Like

For more than five years, Russian forces and their proxies have waged a bloody war against Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The conflict has claimed more than 13,000 lives, driven almost two million people from their homes, and caused immense material damage. France and Germany have together sought to broker peace but failed to produce a durable cease-fire—let alone a political settlement....

If European efforts continue to falter, the United States should take a more active role in the peacemaking process, working with European countries to make Russia’s military engagement in Ukraine more costly and a settlement more attractive. Moreover, Washington should set forth its own peace plan—one that builds on previous diplomatic efforts but includes a UN-authorized peacekeeping mission and an interim international administration in Donbas.

Read the rest at Foreign Affairs