I returned on Monday from traveling to Ukraine with a congressional delegation led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his top national security team in Kyiv for almost three hours.
Zelenskyy is a remarkably impressive wartime leader. His grasp of the military, civilian and humanitarian issues facing his country is extraordinary. Although it was our first meeting, I felt I knew him because of all I’d learned through my role as lead House manager in Donald Trump’s first impeachment. This was the man Trump tried to shake down by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid unless Zelenskyy granted him a now-infamous political “favor.”
In Kyiv, I was once again struck by the depravity of that act — preventing military aid from getting to Ukrainian soldiers when they were already fighting the Russians and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and dying every week. But I was struck by something else as well: Zelenskyy’s first major engagement with the United States must have caused him to question American values, and whether all global diplomacy would be characterized by such shameful transactionalism.
