The last time Donald Trump did this, it was in secret, and he got impeached over it. In 2019, Trump, on a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded that the Ukrainian president produce – or fabricate – evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, the son of Trump’s eventual opponent in the 2020 election, in exchange for continued US military aid.
At the time, Russia had already seized control of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and was funding violent insurgent groups in the country’s east; it was increasingly clear that a full-scale Russian invasion was coming, as it finally did in 2022. Since the end of second world war, it has been the US that checks Russian expansionist ambitions in Europe – the US that provided the backstop to the Nato alliance, the US that secured the independence of eastern Europe. The US president wanted to condition that longstanding role on the Ukrainian president doing him a personal political favor. The international order could be ended, he suggested, if those who depended on him didn’t do enough to indulge his vanity, self-interest and impulsive whims.
