The Bear and the Eagle
Volume 1: The Unexpected Victory (2016–2017)*
April 2019 – December 2019
Washington – Kyiv – Moscow – New York – Brussels
As the Mueller Report faded from front-page headlines, a new storm gathered—one not from a courtroom, but from a phone call. If the Trump–Russia chapter had been about election interference, this one revolved around foreign leverage, Ukraine, and the power of a U.S. President to shape foreign aid policy in pursuit of personal political gain.
For Vladimir Putin, it was an ironic twist: the West, once unified around Ukrainian sovereignty, was now tearing itself apart over the very issue.
The Ukraine Call
On 25 July 2019, President Donald Trump held a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, newly elected in a landslide victory against a corrupt political establishment.
During the conversation, Trump repeatedly urged Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden, the former U.S. Vice President and frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic nomination, along with Biden’s son Hunter, who had served on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company.
Crucially, Trump had withheld $391 million in military aid to Ukraine prior to the call—funds already approved by Congress for Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression.
A whistleblower complaint filed in August 2019 revealed that U.S. officials were alarmed by what they saw as an attempt to coerce a foreign government into helping Trump politically. The phrase “quid pro quo” quickly entered the headlines (ICIG, 2019).
Impeachment Begins
By September, the House of Representatives launched a formal impeachment inquiry. Over weeks of televised hearings, diplomats and national security officials—including Ambassador William Taylor, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch—testified under oath that Trump had conditioned official U.S. policy on personal political objectives.
- Fiona Hill, former Russia advisor to the National Security Council, described the Ukraine operation as a “domestic political errand” that diverged from official foreign policy (House Intel, 2019).
- Gordon Sondland, U.S. Ambassador to the EU and a Trump appointee, stated directly:
“Everyone was in the loop.”
In Moscow, the Kremlin followed the proceedings with interest. Russian officials noted the irony of Ukraine—intended as the West’s moral high ground—now becoming the pivot of U.S. political dysfunction.
The First Trump Impeachment
On 18 December 2019, Donald Trump became the third U.S. president in history to be impeached, charged with:
- Abuse of power (for pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden)
- Obstruction of Congress (for blocking witness testimony and document release)
The House vote split almost entirely along party lines:
- 230–197 on Article I
- 229–198 on Article II
No Republicans voted to impeach. The Senate trial, beginning in early 2020, would predictably acquit him. But the long-term damage to U.S. credibility abroad and internal institutional trust was substantial.
Ukraine in the Crossfire
For Ukraine, the scandal was devastating. Zelenskyy, desperate for U.S. military and diplomatic support against Russia, was thrust into a transatlantic power game. Though he tried to avoid publicly criticising Trump, his position became politically precarious.
Meanwhile, Putin capitalised. He ramped up efforts to normalise Russian presence in eastern Ukraine, issued more Russian passports to residents of Donbas, and framed the entire impeachment drama as proof that Western values were hypocritical and unstable (TASS, 2019).
Russian media framed the narrative:
“The Americans lecture us about transparency, yet their president withholds aid for political dirt.”
Europe and the Vacuum
As U.S. foreign policy became paralysed by internal crisis, European leaders scrambled to fill the void in Ukraine. Germany and France revived the Normandy Format talks in December 2019, bringing together Zelenskyy and Putin in Paris for the first time.
Though some prisoner exchanges were agreed upon, the Minsk Agreements remained unimplemented. Ukrainian sovereignty remained incomplete, and Crimea’s annexation a fait accompli.
Putin, seeing Washington distracted and Brussels divided, pursued his strategy of frozen conflicts and piecemeal dominance.
The Shadow of 2020
By the end of 2019, America was on the brink of another election. Trump’s base remained loyal. Democrats were divided between centrists and progressives. Biden, though damaged by the Burisma narrative, maintained a polling edge.
Putin’s calculus was clear:
- Undermine Biden early
- Exploit Western divisions
- Maintain a fragmented Ukraine
- Expand Russian influence without firing a major shot
In the chess game of post-Soviet space and Western liberal democracies, Trump’s chaos had become Russia’s opportunity.
But a new threat loomed—one no intelligence agency had predicted: a virus in Wuhan.
References
- House Intelligence Committee. (2019). Impeachment Inquiry Hearings: Testimonies of Hill, Vindman, Sondland, Taylor, Yovanovitch. https://intelligence.house.gov
- Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (ICIG). (2019). Whistleblower Complaint – August 2019. https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/whistleblower_complaint_unclassified.pdf
- TASS. (2019, Dec 19). Putin: Trump impeachment shows internal crisis in US politics. https://tass.com/politics/1101649
- U.S. House of Representatives. (2019). Roll Call Votes on Articles of Impeachment. https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2019/roll695.xml