Trump and Vance, I think, never really intended to have a conversation with Zelenskky. Instead, they wanted to look tough on TV<\/p>\n
The last time Donald Trump did this, it was in secret, and he got impeached over it. In 2019, Donald Trump, on a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded that the Ukrainian president produce \u2013 or fabricate \u2013 evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, the son of Trump\u2019s eventual opponent in the 2020 election, in exchange for continued US military aide.<\/p>\n
At the time, Russia had already seized control of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and was funding violent insurgent groups in the country\u2019s 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 America that checks Russian expansionist ambitions in Europe \u2013 America that provided the backstop to the Nato alliance, America that secured the independence of eastern Europe. Trump wanted to condition that longstanding role on Zelenskyy doing him a personal political favor. The international order could be ended, he suggested, if those who depended on him didn\u2019t do enough to indulge his vanity, self-interest and impulsive whims.<\/p>\n
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist<\/p>\n
Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Trump and Vance, I think, never really intended to have a conversation with Zelenskky. Instead, they wanted to look tough on TV The last time Donald Trump did this, it was in secret, and he got impeached over it. In 2019, Donald Trump, on a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanded that the Ukrainian president … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34753\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}