1100 Trump impeached for delaying massive weapons shipment to Ukraine

Trump impeached for delaying massive weapons shipment to Ukraine

Newsletter published on December 31, 2019

(1) Trump impeached for delaying massive weapons shipment to Ukraine
(2) NYT: Trump's order to halt $391 million military aid to Ukraine,
already authorized by Congress
(3) Ukraine end-of-history clash between Deep State & Russia - the CIA
view, from Foreign Affairs

(1) Trump impeached for delaying massive weapons shipment to Ukraine
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/31/pers-d31.html

The impeachment crisis and US war plans against Russia

Andre Damon

31 December 2019

With each passing day of the impeachment crisis, the distance between
the official reasons for the conflict in Washington and the real reasons
grows wider.

It has become increasingly clear that the central issue is not Trump's
attempt to "solicit interference from a foreign country" by "pressuring
a foreign country to investigate one of the president's main domestic
political rivals," as alleged in the whistleblower complaint that
triggered the impeachment inquiry.

Rather, the conflict raging within the state centers on Trump's decision
to temporarily delay a massive weapons shipment to Ukraine.

The ferocity with which the entire US national security apparatus
responded to the delay raises the question: Is there a timetable for
using these weapons in combat to fight a war against Russia?

A New York Times front-page exposé published Monday, coming in at 80,000
words and bearing six bylines, makes it clear that Trump's decision to
withhold military aid—over a month before his phone call with Ukrainian
President Zelensky—triggered the conflict that led to the president's
impeachment.

As the Times reports, "Mr. Trump's order to hold $391 million worth of
sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, night vision goggles, medical
aid and other equipment the Ukrainian military needed to fight a
grinding war against Russian-backed separatists would help pave a path
to the president's impeachment."

The newspaper states that Trump decided to hold up the distribution of
military aid to Ukraine on June 19 after he read a news article saying
that the "Pentagon would pay for weapons and other military equipment
for Ukraine, bringing American security aid to the country to $1.5
billion since 2014."

Trump's action sparked a "fiery internal debate," according to the
Times, leading to an intervention by the "national security team"
arrayed in a "united front" around National Security Advisor John
Bolton, an architect of the Iraq war.

After Trump rejected the officials' calls for the aid to be released,
saying, "We are pissing away our money," details of the hold on the
military assistance were leaked to the press and a high-ranking CIA
official submitted a "whistleblower" complaint accusing Trump of
soliciting "dirt" on his political rival.

The CIA spun up its "Mighty Wurlitzer." The intelligence agencies and
the media began promoting the narrative that Trump held up the military
aid to hurt his political rival, even though Trump made his decision on
the aid package a month before he asked Zelensky to investigate former
Vice President Joe Biden.

These actions would ultimately lead to only the third impeachment of a
president in the history of the United States, throwing the country into
a constitutional crisis with an unknown outcome.

All of this begs the question: Given the enormous political cost of
impeachment to those who initiated it, what could possibly explain the
urgency and ferocity with which the entire national security
establishment responded to a delay in the distribution of weapons to
Ukraine?

Is there a timetable for using these weapons in combat? Is the United
States planning a provocation that would thrust Ukraine into a major new
military offensive?

The Russian military is certainly drawing such conclusions. In a
statement earlier in December, the chief of the Russian General Staff,
Valery Gerasinov, said the increased tempo of US exercises in Eastern
Europe indicates that indicates the US is making plans for "using their
forces in a large-scale military conflict."

"Military activities are increasing in the Baltic States and Poland, in
the Black and Baltic Seas," Gerasimov said. "The intensity of the [NATO]
bloc's military exercises is growing. Their scenarios point to NATO's
deliberate preparation to use their forces in a large-scale military
conflict."

In February, the United States will ship some 20,000 soldiers to Europe
to participate in a military exercise that will be the largest
deployment of forces to the European continent in a quarter-century. The
exercise, dubbed Defender 2020, will include 17,000 European troops and,
according to Breaking Defense, see NATO forces "extend their logistics
trains and communications lines from the Baltic to the Black Seas." The
exercise will cost $340 million.

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed with overwhelming
bipartisan support within days of the House vote to impeach Trump,
includes an additional $300 million in military aid to Ukraine as part
of a record-shattering increase in US military spending.

Overall, the United States and its NATO allies have provided over $18
billion in military and other aid to Ukraine since the 2014 US-backed
coup that overthrew the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and
installed the current pro-US regime. This was on top of what Assistant
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland bragged in 2013 was "over $5 billion"
in aid to "ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine."

The bags of money handed out by the CIA via various "civil society"
pass-throughs in Ukraine helped overthrow its elected government and
bring to power a US proxy regime supported by the extreme right.

In 2013, the US supported a measure that would integrate Ukraine into a
political association and trade pact with the EU. This was intended to
pave the way for Ukraine joining NATO. When the Yanukovych government
opposed the agreement, the US launched the 2014 coup, installing a
puppet regime viciously hostile to Russia.

The 2014 coup was a pivotal point in the efforts of the United States to
militarily encircle and ultimately carve up Russia. Since the
dissolution of the USSR, the United States has led a systematic drive to
expand NATO right up to and beyond the borders of the former USSR.

As Foreign Affairs notes:

In March 2004, NATO accepted into its ranks the three Baltic
states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which were once part of the Soviet
Union, and four other states. The accession of the Baltics signaled that
NATO enlargement would not halt at the former border of the Soviet
Union. The EU followed suit in May 2004, extending its border eastward
to include a number of former Soviet republics and allies, including the
Baltic states, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

But the US was taken aback by Russia's determined response to the
Ukraine coup. Russia annexed Crimea following a referendum in which the
overwhelming majority of the population of the enclave supported leaving
Ukraine. Moscow at the same time backed a secessionist movement in the
country's east.

Given these circumstances, Foreign Affairs writes:

In fact, that Ukraine is at the center of this storm [the impeachment
crisis] should not be surprising at all. Over the past quarter-century,
nearly all major efforts at establishing a durable post–Cold War order
on the Eurasian continent have foundered on the shoals of Ukraine. For
it is in Ukraine that the disconnect between triumphalist end-of-history
delusions and the ongoing realities of great-power competition can be
seen in its starkest form.

Despite the unforeseen and disastrous consequences of the CIA-backed
coup in Ukraine, the United States is determined to continue its efforts
to militarily encircle Russia, which it sees as a major obstacle to its
central geopolitical aim—control of the Eurasian landmass, which would
give it a staging ground for a conflict with China.

The relentless drive for military escalation has brought the Democrats
into an alliance with the fascistic right in Ukraine, which has held
street demonstrations to pressure President Zelensky to continue and
escalate the US-backed proxy war against Russia.

One thing is clear. If there is indeed a timetable to use the hundreds
of millions of dollars in weapons being transferred to Ukraine, such a
war risks a nuclear escalation. In 2018, Elbridge A. Colby, one of the
principal authors of the National Defense Strategy issued by the
Pentagon in January of that year, published an article titled, "If You
Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War."

He wrote:

The risks of nuclear brinkmanship may be enormous, but so is the payoff
from gaining a nuclear advantage over an opponent.

Any future confrontation with Russia or China could go nuclear… In a
harder-fought, more uncertain struggle, each combatant may be tempted to
reach for the nuclear saber to up the ante and test the other side's
resolve, or even just to keep fighting.

Amid a growing upsurge of the class struggle all over the world, the
Trump administration, representing a despised and isolated capitalist
class, can see in war a means to tamp down, as one comment in the
Financial Times recently put it, the "class war" at home, and "make
domestic antagonism seem beside the point, if not unconscionable."

But it is the international growth of the class struggle that provides
the means to oppose the war drive of the ruling elite. As mankind enters
the third decade of the 21st century, the advanced stage of war
preparations on the part of the ruling class makes it all the more
urgent, in the immortal words of Leon Trotsky, to counterpose to the
"war map" of the capitalists the "map of the class struggle."

This means unifying the growing struggles and forging a common movement
against war and attacks on democratic rights, as an essential part of
the struggle for socialism.

(2) NYT: Trump's order to halt $391 million military aid to Ukraine,
already authorized by Congress

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/29/us/politics/trump-ukraine-military-aid.html

Behind the Ukraine Aid Freeze: 84 Days of Conflict and Confusion

The inside story of President Trump's demand to halt military assistance
to an ally shows the price he was willing to pay to carry out his agenda.

By Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and Mark Mazzetti

Dec. 29, 2019

WASHINGTON — Deep into a long flight to Japan aboard Air Force One with
President Trump, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff,
dashed off an email to an aide back in Washington.

"I'm just trying to tie up some loose ends," Mr. Mulvaney wrote. "Did we
ever find out about the money for Ukraine and whether we can hold it back?"

It was June 27, more than a week after Mr. Trump had first asked about
putting a hold on security aid to Ukraine, an embattled American ally,
and Mr. Mulvaney needed an answer.

The aide, Robert B. Blair, replied that it would be possible, but not
pretty. "Expect Congress to become unhinged" if the White House tried to
countermand spending passed by the House and Senate, he wrote in a
previously undisclosed email. And, he wrote, it might further fuel the
narrative that Mr. Trump was pro-Russia. Mr. Blair was right, even if
his prediction of a messy outcome was wildly understated. Mr. Trump's
order to hold $391 million worth of sniper rifles, rocket-propelled
grenades, night vision goggles, medical aid and other equipment the
Ukrainian military needed to fight a grinding war against Russian-backed
separatists would help pave a path to the president's impeachment.

The Democratic-led inquiry into Mr. Trump's dealings with Ukraine this
spring and summer established that the president was actively involved
in parallel efforts — both secretive and highly unusual — to bring
pressure on a country he viewed with suspicion, if not disdain.

One campaign, spearheaded by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president's
personal lawyer, aimed to force Ukraine to conduct investigations that
could help Mr. Trump politically, including one focused on a potential
Democratic 2020 rival, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The other, which unfolded nearly simultaneously but has gotten less
attention, was the president's demand to withhold the security
assistance. By late summer, the two efforts merged as American diplomats
used the withheld aid as leverage in the effort to win a public
commitment from the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to
carry out the investigations Mr. Trump sought into Mr. Biden and
unfounded or overblown theories about Ukraine interfering in the 2016
election. Interviews with dozens of current and former administration
officials, congressional aides and others, previously undisclosed emails
and documents, and a close reading of thousands of pages of impeachment
testimony provide the most complete account yet of the 84 days from when
Mr. Trump first inquired about the money to his decision in September to
relent. What emerges is the story of how Mr. Trump's demands sent shock
waves through the White House and the Pentagon, created deep rifts
within the senior ranks of his administration, left key aides like Mr.
Mulvaney under intensifying scrutiny — and ended only after Mr. Trump
learned of a damning whistle-blower report and came under pressure from
influential Republican lawmakers.

In many ways, the havoc Mr. Giuliani and other Trump loyalists set off
in the State Department by pursuing the investigations was matched by
conflicts and confusion in the White House and Pentagon stemming from
Mr. Trump's order to withhold the aid.

Opposition to the order from his top national security advisers was more
intense than previously known. In late August, Defense Secretary Mark T.
Esper joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John R. Bolton, the
national security adviser at the time, for a previously undisclosed Oval
Office meeting with the president where they tried but failed to
convince him that releasing the aid was in interests of the United States.

By late summer, top lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget who
had spoken to lawyers at the White House and the Justice Department in
the weeks beforehand, were developing an argument — not previously
divulged publicly — that Mr. Trump's role as commander in chief would
simply allow him to override Congress on the issue.

And Mr. Mulvaney is shown to have been deeply involved as a key conduit
for transmitting Mr. Trump's demands for the freeze across the
administration.

The interviews and documents show how Mr. Trump used the bureaucracy to
advance his agenda in the face of questions about its propriety and even
legality from officials in the White House budget office and the
Pentagon, many of whom say they were kept in the dark about the
president's motivations and had grown used to convention-flouting
requests from the West Wing. One veteran budget official who raised
questions about the legal justification was pushed aside. Those carrying
out Mr. Trump's orders on the aid were for the most part operating in
different lanes from those seeking the investigations, including Mr.
Giuliani and a number of senior diplomats, including Gordon D. Sondland,
the ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt D. Volker, the State
Department's special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. The New York Times
found that some key players are now offering a defense that they did not
know the diplomatic push for the investigations was playing out at the
same time they were implementing the aid freeze — or if they were aware
of both channels, they did not connect the two.

Mr. Mulvaney is said by associates to have stepped out of the room
whenever Mr. Trump would talk with Mr. Giuliani to preserve Mr. Trump's
attorney-client privilege, leaving him with limited knowledge about
their efforts regarding Ukraine. Mr. Mulvaney has told associates he
learned of the substance of Mr. Trump's July 25 call weeks after the fact.

Yet testimony before the House suggests a different picture. Fiona Hill,
a top deputy to Mr. Bolton at the time, told the impeachment inquiry
about a July 10 White House meeting at which Mr. Sondland said Mr.
Mulvaney had guaranteed that Mr. Zelensky would be invited to the White
House if the Ukrainians agreed to the investigations — an arrangement
that Mr. Bolton described as a "drug deal," according to Ms. Hill.

Along with Mr. Bolton and others, Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Blair have
declined to cooperate with impeachment investigators and provide
information to Congress under oath, an intensifying point of friction
between the two parties as the Senate prepares for Mr. Trump's
impeachment trial. At the center of the maelstrom was the Office of
Management and Budget, a seldom-scrutinized arm of the White House that
during the Trump administration has often had to find creative legal
reasoning to justify the president's unorthodox policy proposals, like
his demand to divert Pentagon funding to his proposed wall along the
border with Mexico.

In the Ukraine case, however, shock about the president's decision
spread across America's national security apparatus — from the National
Security Council to the State Department and the Pentagon. By September,
after the freeze had become public and scrutiny was increasing, the
blame game inside the administration was in full swing.

On Sept. 10, the day before Mr. Trump changed his mind, a political
appointee at the budget office, Michael P. Duffey, wrote a lengthy email
to the Pentagon's top budget official, with whom he had been at odds
throughout the summer about how long the agency could withhold the aid.

He asserted that the Defense Department had the authority to do more to
ensure that the aid could be released to Ukraine by the congressionally
mandated deadline of the end of that month, suggesting that
responsibility for any failure should not rest with the White House.

Forty-three minutes later, the Pentagon official, Elaine McCusker, hit
send on a brief but stinging reply.

"You can't be serious," she wrote. "I am speechless."

‘We Need to Hold It Up'

For top officials inside the budget office, the first warning came on
June 19.

Informed that the president had a problem with the aid, Mr. Blair called
Russell T. Vought, the acting head of the Office of Management and
Budget. "We need to hold it up," he said, according to officials briefed
about the conversation. Typical of the Trump White House, the inquiry
was not born of a rigorous policy process. Aides speculated that someone
had shown Mr. Trump a news article about the Ukraine assistance and he
demanded to know more.

Mr. Vought and his team took to Google, and came upon a piece in the
conservative Washington Examiner saying that the Pentagon would pay for
weapons and other military equipment for Ukraine, bringing American
security aid to the country to $1.5 billion since 2014.

The money, the article noted, was coming at a critical moment: Mr.
Zelensky, a onetime comedian, had called ending the armed conflict with
Russia in eastern Ukraine his top priority — a move that would likely
only happen if he could negotiate from a position of strength. The
budget office officials had little idea of why Mr. Trump was interested
in the topic, but many of the president's more senior aides were well
aware of his feelings about Ukraine. Weeks earlier, in an Oval Office
meeting on May 23, with Mr. Sondland, Mr. Mulvaney and Mr. Blair in
attendance, Mr. Trump batted away assurances that Mr. Zelensky was
committed to confronting corruption.

"They are all corrupt, they are all terrible people," Mr. Trump said,
according to testimony in the impeachment inquiry.

The United States had been planning to provide $391 million in military
assistance to Ukraine in two chunks: $250 million allocated by the
Pentagon for war-fighting equipment — from sniper rifles to
rocket-propelled grenade launchers — and $141 million controlled by the
State Department to buy night-vision devices, radar systems and yet more
rocket-grenade launchers. With the money having been appropriated by
Congress, it would be hard for the administration to keep it from being
spent by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

The task of dealing with the president's demands fell primarily to a
group of political appointees in the West Wing and the budget office,
most with personal and professional ties to Mr. Mulvaney. There was no
public announcement that Mr. Trump wanted the assistance withheld.
Neither Congress nor the Ukrainian government was formally notified.

Mr. Mulvaney had first served in the administration as the budget
director, after three terms in the House, where he earned a reputation
as a firebrand conservative.

The four top political appointees helping Mr. Mulvaney execute the hold
— Mr. Vought, Mr. Blair, Mr. Duffey and Mark Paoletta, the budget
office's top lawyer — all had extensive experience in either
congressional budget politics or Republican and conservative causes.

Their efforts would cause tension and at times conflict between
officials at the budget office and the Pentagon, some of whom watched
with growing alarm.

A Question of Legality

The single largest chunk of the federal government's annual
discretionary budget, some $800 billion a year, goes to the Pentagon,
spy agencies and the Department of Veterans Affairs. The career official
in charge of managing the flow of all that money for the budget office
is an Afghanistan war veteran named Mark Sandy.

After learning about the president's June 19 request, Mr. Sandy
contacted the Pentagon to learn more about the aid package. He also
repeatedly pressed Mr. Duffey about why Mr. Trump had imposed the hold
in the first place. "He didn't provide an explicit response on the
reason," Mr. Sandy testified in the impeachment inquiry. "He simply said
we need to let the hold take place — and I'm paraphrasing here — and
then revisit this issue with the president."

 From the start, budget office officials took the position that the
money did not have to go out the door until the end of September, giving
them time to address the president's questions.

It was easy enough for the White House to hold up the State Department
portion of the funding. Since the State Department had not yet notified
Congress of its plans to release the money, all it took was making sure
that the notification did not happen.

Freezing the Pentagon's $250 million portion was more difficult, since
the Pentagon had already certified that Ukraine had met requirements set
by Congress to show that it was addressing its endemic corruption and
notified lawmakers of its intent to spend the money.

So on July 19, Mr. Duffey proposed an unusual solution: Mr. Sandy should
attach a footnote to a routine budget document saying the money was
being temporarily withheld.

Approving such requests is routine; Mr. Sandy processed hundreds each
year. But attaching a footnote to block spending that the administration
had already notified Congress was ready to go was not. Mr. Sandy said in
testimony that he had never done it before in his 12 years at the
agency. And there was a problem with this maneuver: Mr. Sandy was
concerned it might violate a law called the Impoundment Control Act that
protects Congress's spending power and prohibits the administration from
blocking disbursement of the aid unless it notifies Congress.

"I asked about the duration of the hold and was told there was not clear
guidance on that," Mr. Sandy testified. "So that is what prompted my
concern."

Mr. Sandy sought advice from the top lawyers at the budget office.

A Pivotal Day

For a full month, the fact that Mr. Trump wanted to halt the aid
remained confined primarily to a small group of officials.

That ended on July 18, when a group of top administration officials
meeting on Ukraine policy — including some calling in from Kyiv —
learned from a midlevel budget office official that the president had
ordered the aid frozen.

"I and the others on the call sat in astonishment," William B. Taylor
Jr., the top United States diplomat in Ukraine, testified to House
investigators. "In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of
our strong support for Ukraine was threatened."

That same day, aides on the House Foreign Affairs Committee received
four calls from administration sources warning them about the hold and
urging them to look into it.

A week later came Mr. Trump's fateful July 25 call with Mr. Zelensky.
Mr. Bolton, the national security adviser, had recommended the call take
place in an effort to end the "incessant lobbying" from officials like
Mr. Sondland that the two leaders connect. Some of Mr. Trump's aides had
thought the call might lead Mr. Trump to lift the freeze. But Mr. Trump
did not specifically mention the hold, and instead asked Mr. Zelensky to
look into Mr. Biden and his son and into supposed Ukrainian involvement
in the 2016 election. Among those listening on the call was Mr. Blair.

Mr. Blair has told associates he did not make much of Mr. Trump's
requests during the call for the investigations. He saw the aid freeze
not as a political tool, but as an extension of Mr. Trump's general
aversion to foreign aid and his belief that Ukraine is rife with corruption.

Just 90 minutes after the call ended, and following days of email
traffic on the topic, Mr. Duffey, Mr. Sandy's boss, sent out a new email
to the Pentagon, where officials were impatient about getting the money
out the door. His message was clear: Do not spend it.

"Given the sensitive nature of the request, I appreciate your keeping
that information closely held to those who need to know to execute the
direction," Mr. Duffey wrote in his note, which was released this month
to the Center for Public Integrity.

This caused immediate discomfort at the Pentagon, with a top official
there noting that this hold on military assistance was coming on the
same day Ukraine announced it had seized a Russian tanker — a potential
escalation in the conflict between the two nations.

On that same day, Mr. Sandy, having received the go-ahead from the
budget office's lawyers, took the first official step to legally impose
what they called a "brief pause," inserting a footnote into the budget
document that prohibited the Pentagon from spending any of the aid until
Aug. 5. By that point, officials in Ukraine were getting word that
something was up. At the same time, the effort to win a commitment from
the Ukrainians for the investigations sought by Mr. Trump was
intensifying, with Mr. Giuliani and a Zelensky aide, Andriy Yermak,
meeting in Madrid on Aug. 2 and the diplomats Mr. Sondland and Mr.
Volker also working the issue.

And inside the intelligence community, a C.I.A. officer was hearing talk
about the two strands of pressure on Ukraine, including the aid freeze.
Seeing how they fit together, he was alarmed enough that by Aug. 12 he
would take the extraordinary step of laying them out in detail in a
confidential whistle-blower complaint.

A ‘POTUS-level Decision'

Keeping a hold on the assistance was now a top priority, so officials
moved to tighten control over the money.

In a very unusual step, the White House removed Mr. Sandy's authority to
oversee the aid freeze. The job was handed in late July to Mr. Sandy's
boss, Mr. Duffey, the political appointee, the official ultimately
responsible for apportionments but one who had little experience in the
nuts and bolts of the budget office process.

As the debate over the aid continued, disagreements flared. Two budget
office staff members left the agency after the summer. Mr. Sandy
testified that their departures were related to the aid freeze, a
statement disputed by budget office officials.

Pentagon officials, in the dark about the reason for the holdup, grew
increasingly frustrated. Ms. McCusker, the powerful Pentagon budget
official, notified the budget office that either $61 million of the
money would have to be spent by Monday, Aug. 12 or it would be lost. The
budget office saw her threat as a ploy to force release of the aid.

At the White House, which had been looped into the dispute by the budget
office, there was a growing consensus that officials could find a legal
rationale for continuing the hold, but with the Monday deadline looming,
it was a "POTUS-level decision," one official said. Complicating
matters, another budget battle was escalating. Mr. Vought was attempting
to impose cuts of as much as $4 billion on the nation's overall foreign
aid budget. It was an entirely separate initiative from the Ukraine
freeze, and was quickly abandoned, but helped the White House establish
that its concern about aid was not limited to Ukraine.

By the second week of August, Mr. Duffey had taken to issuing footnotes
every few days to block the Pentagon spending. Office of Management and
Budget lawyers approved each one.

Mr. Trump spent the weekend before the Pentagon's Aug. 12 deadline at
Bedminster, his New Jersey golf resort.

In a previously unreported sequence of events, Mr. Mulvaney worked to
schedule a call for that day with Mr. Trump and top aides involved in
the freeze, including Mr. Vought, Mr. Bolton and Pat Cipollone, the
White House counsel. But they waited to set a final time because Mr.
Trump had a golf game planned for Monday morning with John Daly, the
flamboyant professional golfer, and they did not know how long it would
take.

Late that morning, Ms. McCusker checked in with the budget office. "Hey,
any update for us?" she asked in an email obtained by Center for Public
Integrity.

Mr. Duffey was still waiting for an answer as of late that afternoon.
"Elaine — I don't have an update," he wrote back. "I am attempting to
get one." The planned-for conference call with the president never
happened. Budget office lawyers decided that Ms. McCusker had
inaccurately raised alarms about the Aug. 12 date to try to force their
hand.

In Bedminster with Mr. Trump, Mr. Mulvaney finally reached the president
and the answer was clear: Mr. Trump wanted the freeze kept in place. In
Washington, the whistle-blower submitted his report that same day.

The National Security Team Intervenes

Inside the administration, pressure was mounting on Mr. Trump to reverse
himself.

Backed by a memo saying the National Security Council, the Pentagon and
the State Department all wanted the aid released, Mr. Bolton made a
personal appeal to Mr. Trump on Aug. 16, but was rebuffed.

On Aug. 28, Politico published a story reporting that the assistance to
Ukraine had been frozen. After more than two months, the issue, the
topic of fiery internal debate, was finally public.

Mr. Bolton's relationship with the president had been deteriorating for
months, and he would leave the White House weeks later, but on this
front he had powerful internal allies.

On a sunny, late-August day, Mr. Bolton, Mr. Esper and Mr. Pompeo
arrayed themselves around the Resolute desk in the Oval Office to
present a united front, the leaders of the president's national security
team seeking to convince him face to face that freeing up the money for
Ukraine was the right thing to do. One by one they made their case.

"This is in America's interest," Mr. Bolton argued, according to one
official briefed on the gathering. "This defense relationship, we have
gotten some really good benefits from it," Mr. Esper added, noting that
most of the money was being spent on military equipment made in the
United States.

Mr. Trump responded that he did not believe Mr. Zelensky's promises of
reform. He emphasized his view that corruption remained endemic and
repeated his position that European nations needed to do more for
European defense.

"Ukraine is a corrupt country," the president said. "We are pissing away
our money."

The aid remained blocked. On Aug. 31, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of
Wisconsin, arranged a call with Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson had been told
days earlier by Mr. Sondland that the aid would be unblocked only if the
Ukrainians gave Mr. Trump the investigations he wanted.

When Mr. Johnson asked Mr. Trump directly if the aid was contingent on
getting a commitment to pursue the investigations, Mr. Johnson later
said, Mr. Trump replied, amid a string of expletives, that there was no
such demand and he would never do such a thing.

Around the same time, White House lawyers informed Mr. Trump about the
whistle-blower's complaint regarding his pressure campaign. It is not
clear how much detail the lawyers provided the president about the
details of the complaint, which noted the aid freeze.

Mr. Trump was scheduled to travel to Poland on Sept. 1 to commemorate
the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, and had planned to
get together with Mr. Zelensky. Some administration officials hoped
meeting the new Ukrainian president in person would change Mr. Trump's
mind. But a hurricane was bearing down on the United States, and Mr.
Trump sent Vice President Mike Pence in his place. When Mr. Zelensky
raised the issue with the vice president, Mr. Pence said he should speak
with Mr. Trump.

Behind the scenes in Warsaw, Mr. Sondland, the American envoy who was
Mr. Trump's point person on getting the Ukrainians to agree to the
investigations, had a blunter message. Until the Ukrainians publicly
announced the investigations, he told Mr. Yermak, the Zelensky adviser,
they should not expect to get the military aid. (Mr. Yermak has
questioned Mr. Sondland's account.)

An Abrupt Reversal

By late summer, top lawyers at the budget office were developing a
proposed legal justification for the hold, based in part on
conversations with White House lawyers as well as the Justice Department.

Their argument was that lifting the hold would undermine Mr. Trump's
negotiating position in his efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine.

The president, the lawyers believed, could ignore the requirements of
the Impoundment Control Act and continue to hold the aid by asserting
constitutional commander in chief powers that give him authority over
diplomacy. He could do so, they believed, if he determined that, based
on existing circumstances, releasing the money would undermine military
or diplomatic efforts.

But divisions within the administration continued to widen; Mr. Bolton
was opposed to using an argument proffered by administration lawyers to
block the funding. And pressure from Congress was intensifying. Mr.
Johnson and another influential Republican, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio,
were both pushing for the aid to be released. On a call with Mr. Portman
on Sept. 11, Mr. Trump repeated his familiar refrain about other nations
not doing enough to support Ukraine.

"Sure, I agree with you," Mr. Portman responded, according to an aide
who described the exchange. "But we should not hold that against
Ukraine. We need to release these funds."

Democrats in the House were gearing up to limit Mr. Trump's power to
hold up the money to Ukraine, and the chairmen of three House committees
had also announced on Sept. 9 that they were opening an investigation.

Still, White House officials did not expect anything to change,
especially since Mr. Trump had repeatedly rejected the advice of his
national security team.

But then, just as suddenly as the hold was imposed, it was lifted. Mr.
Trump, apparently unwilling to wage a public battle, told Mr. Portman he
would let the money go.

White House aides rushed to notify their counterparts at the Pentagon
and elsewhere. The freeze had been lifted. The money could be spent. Get
it out the door, they were told.

The debate would now begin as to why the hold was lifted, with Democrats
confident they knew the answer. "I have no doubt about why the president
allowed the assistance to go forward," said Representative Eliot L.
Engel, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee. "He got caught."

Adam Goldman, Edward Wong and Peter Baker contributed reporting.

(3) Ukraine end-of-history clash between Deep State & Russia - the CIA
view, from Foreign Affairs
NOTE (Peter M): This article omits to mention the $5 billion that
Victoria Nuland admitted the US spent in Ukraine to cultivate
'democracy'; and the role of the CIA in the 2014 Maidan coup.

It asserts that Russia DID interfere in the 2016 US election, despite
Mueller not coming up with any evidence for it.

Speaking of Trump, it says, "He decided, despite the consensus of the
U.S. intelligence community, to believe not that Russia had hacked the
election" - this wording shows that the Foreign Affairs article draws
directly on the "intelligence community", i.e. the Deep State (CIA, FBI
etc).

And it says Trump should stop "playing games" with the military aid
Congress promised to Ukraine, to 'protect its sovereignty', i.e. to
enable it to fight  Russia.

The upshot is that the Deep State affirms, in this article, that it has
been plotting war with Russia, in Ukraine, and that Trump's withholding
military aid stymies that plan - that's the reason for his impeachment.
It says, "Washington must protect the impeachment process from Russian
interference".

Should Sanders become front-runner for 2020, the Deep State would turn
against him too. If Biden looks unlikely to beat Trump, they will back
Michael Bloomberg. Since Bloomberg and Sanders cannot abide each other,
a three-way contest is likely in 2020.

They have already accused Tulsi Gabbard of being pro-Russian.

The issue in the impeachment is, thus, whether the Deep State should
continue to run the USA. One need not be a Trump supporter to oppose it.
Gabbard has already come out against it, and Sanders should too, because
those two would be next in the firing line.
(end of Note) ==

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2019-11-22/shoals-ukraine

https://lbfromlv.wordpress.com/2019/11/23/the-shoals-of-ukraine-november-22-2019/

The Shoals of Ukraine

Where American Illusions and Great-Power Politics Collide

By Serhii Plokhy and M. E. Sarotte

Foreign affairs

January/February 2020

At first, it might seem surprising that Ukraine, a country on the
fringes of Europe, is suddenly at the turbulent center of American
politics and foreign policy. With an impeachment inquiry in Washington
adding further detail to the story of the Trump administration’s efforts
to tie U.S. security assistance for the country to Ukrainian cooperation
in investigating President Donald Trump’s Democratic opponents, Trump’s
presidency itself hangs in the balance. And the repercussions go even
further, raising questions about the legitimacy and sustainability of
U.S. power itself.

In fact, that Ukraine is at the center of this storm should not be
surprising at all. Over the past quarter century, nearly all major
efforts at establishing a durable post–Cold War order on the Eurasian
continent have foundered on the shoals of Ukraine. For it is in Ukraine
that the disconnect between triumphalist end-of-history delusions and
the ongoing realities of great-power competition can be seen in its
starkest form. [...]

Problems worsened when further expansion by both NATO and the EU into
eastern Europe put an effective end to the short-lived honeymoon between
Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush. In March 2004, NATO accepted
into its ranks the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania—which were once part of the Soviet Union, and four other
states. The accession of the Baltics signaled that NATO enlargement
would not halt at the former border of the Soviet Union. The EU followed
suit in May 2004, extending its border eastward to include a number of
former Soviet republics and allies, including the Baltic states, the
Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Since Putin, a
leader of an empire denying its own decline, still considered Soviet
borders significant, he viewed such moves as a massive affront.

Few people in Kyiv could imagine Russians and Ukrainians shooting at
each other.

These expansions highlighted Ukraine’s vulnerability. As one of a
handful of fully functioning democracies remaining east of NATO’s and
the EU’s borders, Ukraine suddenly found itself in a particularly
painful form of limbo between the East and the West. Partly in response
came the so-called Orange Revolution, through which Ukrainians made
their aspirations to join the EU clear. Crowds flooded the streets of
Kyiv in November and December 2004 in the wake of a presidential
election of questionable legitimacy and succeeded in demanding truly
free new elections. These resulted in the success of the pro-European
candidate Viktor Yushchenko.

For Putin, the Orange Revolution was a double defeat. Not only did his
candidate lose (despite the Russian president’s having traveled
personally to Ukraine to campaign on his behalf), but the democratic
protests in Ukraine deepened anti-Russian sentiment in the two other
states that had "color revolutions," Georgia and Kyrgyzstan. Putin was
peculiarly sensitive to popular movements that could provoke widespread
street demonstrations. (He had served as a KGB agent in East Germany
when similar protests destabilized the country’s pro-Soviet leadership
in 1989.) And because he refused to accept that Ukraine had truly
removed itself from his domain, he viewed the street demonstrations as
inseparable from protests against his authority inside Russia. In his
eyes, they were all one and the same: direct threats to the stability of
his personal regime.

Yet the Bush administration concluded that this was the moment to push
for NATO to expand further, to include Georgia and Ukraine. The timing
was terrible, as became clear in retrospect. The United States had
missed out on two earlier opportunities to promote Ukrainian security at
a lower cost: it could have given Kyiv the guarantees it had sought as
part of the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, or it could have prioritized
the more inclusive Partnership for Peace over NATO. Instead, the Bush
administration was pushing for NATO’s expansion just as Russia’s
postimperial trauma was on the verge of violence. The administration
wanted to use the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest to sanction the start of
accession procedures for Georgia and Ukraine. But after last-minute
interventions, especially on the part of French and German policymakers,
the summit instead merely announced that Georgia and Ukraine "will
become members of NATO"—keeping the promise of membership alive but the
door to the alliance closed. Yet the damage was done.

Shortly afterward, Putin decided to invade Georgia, a signal whose full
significance the West failed to recognize at the time. The invasion was
not a one-off, caused by Georgian recklessness; rather, it showed the
extent of Russian trauma resulting from both the ongoing imperial
collapse and resentment of the United States and its policies in the
region. But in its own instance of magical thinking, most of the
political class in Kyiv agreed with Westerners that such a fate could
not befall Ukraine, since war between the two largest post-Soviet states
had (they thought) become a virtual impossibility in the post–Cold War
world. Given the historical and cultural ties between the two Slavic
nations, few people in Kyiv could imagine Russians and Ukrainians
shooting at each other.

The Russo-Georgian war was viewed at the time as a mere bump on the road
to a "reset" in U.S.-Russian relations under a new Russian president,
Dmitry Medvedev. Relations briefly improved, making possible the signing
of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, under
President Barack Obama in 2010. Yet this new agreement, like the
Budapest Memorandum of 1994, while promoting nonproliferation generally,
contributed little to the security situation in the post-Soviet space
specifically.

RUSSIA RESURGENT

In 2014, 20 years after the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, violence
resulted again when Kyiv, its NATO ambitions dashed, tried to strengthen
its relations with the EU instead by negotiating a trade agreement. This
renewed effort by Ukraine to assert its independence once again angered
Putin. Russia also sought to preserve a sphere of influence in the
post-Soviet space by stopping NATO and EU expansion at the western
border of Ukraine. Putin successfully pressed Ukraine’s president, the
pro-Russian politician Viktor Yanukovych, to reject the proposed trade
association—only to be shocked by the virulence of the Ukrainian
people’s response: the Maidan protests of late 2013 and early 2014.

Furious at these demonstrations, Putin gave full vent to his imperial
instincts. In violation of the Budapest Memorandum, Russian regular and
paramilitary troops took control of the Crimean Peninsula. Putin sought
openly to reintegrate the post-Soviet space in a new Eurasian military,
political, and economic alliance to balance against both the EU and
China. Russia also launched hybrid warfare in the Donbas region of
eastern Ukraine. Moscow’s goal was to make the "federalization" of
Ukraine necessary, with each of its provinces deciding foreign policy
issues on its own, because that would spell the end of Ukraine’s
pro-Western aspirations.

Ukraine fought back with all the means available to it, including the
help of volunteer battalions and its own existing armed forces, which
were quickly rebuilt after years of neglect. As a result, Russia turned
its hybrid war into a conventional one by sending regular units into
battle. European leaders stepped in to negotiate the Minsk agreements in
September 2014 and February 2015, thereby providing at least a framework
for dialogue. But the fighting continues, and it has claimed close to
13,000 lives, including soldiers, members of paramilitary units, and
civilians. Millions have become refugees, and around four million people
are now stuck in unrecognized separatist republics, financed and backed
militarily and politically by Russia but barely surviving economically.

Having succeeded in gaining territory and destabilizing Ukraine, Putin
has felt emboldened to expand elsewhere. His regime has projected
military power beyond the post-Soviet space, into the Middle East,
Africa, and Latin America. It has also stepped up its cyberwarfare
significantly, most notably in the United States in 2016, when, in the
year that marked the 25th anniversary of the event that caused Putin’s
bitterness—namely, the collapse of the Soviet Union—Russia used social
media and other online tools to interfere in the U.S. presidential
election. Given that Putin views the Soviet Union’s collapse as the
"greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the twentieth century (despite
much competition for that tragic title), he was hardly going to organize
a parade for the anniversary. Instead, he decided to avenge himself on
former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Democratic
presidential nominee—whom he viewed as having masterminded many of the
protests in the post-Soviet space from the State Department—by meddling
in the U.S. election in favor of her opponent, with fateful
consequences. The misunderstood grievances of the old imperial center
had yet again dashed hopes of durable a post–Cold War order.

A FESTERING WOUND

Leaving the issues of Ukraine’s security and its place in the new
international order unresolved for decades had the effect of turning the
country into a dangerous arena. It became a space where the interests of
the great powers clashed and yet no conflicts were resolved. It also
became a place where there was money to be made by outside consultants
advising the locals on how best to outmaneuver their opponents.

One American distinguished himself particularly in this regard: Paul
Manafort. Yanukovych became president of Ukraine in 2010 in no small
part thanks to Manafort’s management of his campaign. In exchange,
Manafort earned more from Yanukovych than the American ever bothered to
admit to American authorities. Trump’s fateful decision to ask Manafort
to manage his own presidential campaign brought Trump and his advisers
onto the shoals of Ukraine, as well.

"Ukrainegate" began soon thereafter, when documents revealing illicit
payments to Manafort were leaked to the Ukrainian newspapers. Manafort’s
close ties with Yanukovych became the subject of an FBI investigation,
leading to his removal from the helm of Trump’s presidential campaign.
Manafort was put on trial in 2018 for tax evasion and fraud and was
sentenced by two U.S. district courts to 90 months in jail. Before
disappearing behind bars, however, Manafort and his pro-Russian
Ukrainian associates appear to have planted in Trump’s head the notion
that corrupt Ukrainian officials were out to undermine him and his
presidency.

Putin has effectively enlisted Trump in his irredentist efforts against
Ukraine. The president soon developed his own magical thinking about
Ukraine. He decided, despite the consensus of the U.S. intelligence
community, to believe not that Russia had hacked the election on his
behalf but that Ukraine had hacked it on behalf of Clinton. He also
seized on a conspiracy theory that former U.S. Vice President Joe
Biden—now a candidate for president—helped fire a corrupt Ukrainian
prosecutor general not, as was actually the case, to advance U.S.
anticorruption policies but to protect his son Hunter Biden. Hunter had
joined the board of Burisma, Ukraine’s largest gas-producing company,
which was at the time under investigation for money laundering. The
practical result of Trump’s magical thinking was the suspension of U.S.
military aid, which could not have been more pleasing to Moscow and more
damaging for the reputation of the United States in the region. Putin
had effectively enlisted Trump in his irredentist efforts.

Now, Trump’s delusion threatens to undermine American voters’ already
shaky confidence in the U.S. democratic system—and the rest of world’s
already eroding faith in the U.S.-led order that was supposed to bring
decades of peace and prosperity in the wake of the Cold War’s end. Past
impeachments in the United States have focused on either immoral
behavior or illicit domestic political activities, but the impeachment
process underway now centers on a president’s misuse of American power
abroad. Decades after they supposedly disappeared, Moscow’s imperial
ambitions—which Putin pursues through the network that runs from the
Kremlin through Ukraine to the White House—have now unsettled American
democracy itself.

Meanwhile, the question of Ukrainian security remains open. The past
decades have made clear that as long as Ukraine’s status is unsettled
and insecure, the consequences will continue to reverberate beyond its
borders. Washington believed that it could ensure Ukraine’s control over
its own destiny without major effort and at low cost. The reality is
that it could not. What is worse, the best means for promoting Ukrainian
security are in the rearview mirror. Expanding NATO to include Ukraine
now would most likely result in more, not less, conflict with Russia.
Washington’s best option at this point is to strengthen its bilateral
political and security ties with Ukraine while working closely with its
European allies to ensure Ukraine’s ability to protect its sovereignty.
And although he is unlikely to do so, Trump should stop playing games
with the aid he has promised to Ukraine; he should prioritize security
assistance and diplomatic engagement over ad hoc dealings. Above all
else, Washington must protect the impeachment process from Russian
interference and get past the illusion that it can promote a stable
political order either at home or abroad without successfully navigating
the shoals of Ukraine.

1