Opinion | Russia’s looming invasion of Ukraine shows why Trump’s first impeachment was necessary and proper

As a refresher: To boost his reelection prospects, Trump froze $391 million in vital security assistance in 2019 as part a broader conspiracy to coerce the Ukrainian government into announcing bogus investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden. Trump also withheld a coveted White House meeting that the new Ukrainian president felt he needed to demonstrate to the Kremlin that he had Washington’s support. Trump even forced out the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, as part of the scheme.

In a July 2019 phone call, Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate not only the Bidens but also a discredited theory that it was Ukraine rather than Russia that attempted to interfere in the 2016 American presidential election. When Zelensky said Ukraine wanted to buy Javelin antitank missiles, Trump interjected: “I would like you to do us a favor though.”

The American president then asked his counterpart “to look into” former vice president Biden’s role in encouraging Ukraine to remove a prosecutor in Kyiv widely viewed by the U.S. government as corrupt. Trump hoped to give credence to an unfounded conspiracy theory that the prosecutor had been removed because he was investigating Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas firm on whose board Hunter Biden sat. (It is worth noting, by the way, that Hunter had no business being on Burisma’s board and wouldn’t have been if his last name wasn’t Biden.)

The Trump-Zelensky call was so outrageously problematic that White House lawyers were alerted, and the summary of what the commander in chief had said was transferred to a super-secret computer system to reduce the number of people who had access. A whistleblower who heard about Trump’s self-serving shakedown of Zelensky filed a report, which set in motion a series of events that led to the security aid being unfrozen and the House launching an investigation. Trump released a partial transcript of the call, which he said was “perfect” and showed he did nothing wrong, an assertion that only underscored how unfit he was for the presidency.

Gordon Sondland, whom Trump appointed as ambassador to the European Union, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that “everyone was in the loop” about the “quid pro quo.” Then-acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney admitted publicly that Trump held up the military aid that had been approved by Congress. “Get over it,” Mulvaney told reporters. “There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”

Again and again, Trump treated Ukraine like a pawn. He placed his personal interests over the national interest. John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser at the time, declined to testify before Congress but later wrote in his memoir that Trump told him that he would not release the aid to Ukraine until he got information about his political enemies. Bolton also revealed that Trump ordered him to call Zelensky to ask him to meet with Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer, who had been spreading some of the most fanciful theories about the Biden-Burisma links. “The whole affair was bad policy, questionable legally, and unacceptable as presidential behavior,” Bolton wrote.

In addition to abuse of power, Trump was also impeached for obstruction of Congress after he refused to cooperate with the probe. A dozen witnesses followed Trump’s orders by refusing to testify. The White House, along with the State, Defense and Energy departments, refused to produce a single document in response to subpoenas.

The whole affair helps explain why Zelensky has struggled to navigate U.S. politics. He was reluctant to play along with the former president and announce an imaginary investigation of Hunter Biden because he didn’t want to antagonize the Democratic front-runner. Then he tried to keep the impeachment drama at arm’s length, playing down the pressure he’d faced because he was nervous about provoking Trump a second time.

All of this put daylight between Washington and Kyiv at a time when Vladimir Putin was known to have designs on Ukraine. All responsibility for an invasion, should it come, can only be laid at Putin’s door. But it is also a partial consequence of Trump’s reckless disregard for a fledgling democracy.

It’s another element of his legacy that will not be featured in any presidential library.