At an Oval Office meeting with the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, in 2017, Donald Trump asked his national security adviser if US troops were in Donbas, territory claimed by Russian-backed separatists, which Vladimir Putin last month used as pretext for a full and bloody invasion.
Describing the meeting in a new book, the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, writes: “An affirmative answer to that question would have meant that the United States was in a shooting war with Russia.”
