Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

U.S. Meddling in Ukraine Is a Disaster

U.S. diplomats will suffer for pursuing a silly and futile goal.

October 4, 2019 at 1:38 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Give him a chance. — Give him a chance.
Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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Thanks to a newly released trove of U.S. official correspondence, the world now knows just how clumsily the Trump administration tried to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to serve its political ends. Perhaps the embarrassment will finally teach the Americans a lesson: This kind of meddling in foreign governments’ affairs will do you no good.

The messages, made public as part of a Congressional impeachment inquiry, illustrate the lengths to which top U.S. diplomats went in pursuing their goal: extracting a public pledge from Zelenskiy to investigate whether Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 U.S. election with the aim of helping Hillary Clinton, and whether former Vice President Joe Biden had improperly hindered a Ukrainian money-laundering probe of a company where his son, Hunter, held a lucrative board seat.