Ukraine president denies Trump 'blackmailed' him to investigate Biden
Ukraine's president has denied that Donald Trump tried to “blackmail” him into starting an investigation linked to candidate Joe Biden, but said he would help the United States if it opened its own investigation.
A July phone call in which Mr Trump asked Volodymyr Zelenskiy to look into shaky allegations that Mr Biden had gotten a Ukrainian prosecutor general fired because he planned to investigate his son has sparked impeachment proceedings in congress.
It emerged that Mr Trump had withheld US military aid to Ukraine, but Mr Zelenskiy told journalists in a 10-hour “press marathon” in a Kyiv food court on Thursday that he did not know about the delayed aid until later.
“There was no blackmail. This was not the subject of our conversation,” he said.
“Our calls had nothing to do with weapons or the story with Burisma,” he added, referring to the gas company where Mr Biden's son Hunter sat on the board. He said the Ukrainian stenogramme of the conversation matched the English one.
At the same time, Mr Zelenskiy said Ukraine was open to doing a joint investigation into the situation with the United States.
“Please connect your general prosecutor with ours,” he said. “Not only on Burisma and Biden. We have many criminal cases to look at.”
He said he didn't want to “comment very much” on the impeachment scandal because he didn't want to “interfere in any way with the elections” in the United States.
Congress is considering whether Mr Trump offered Ukraine a “quid pro quo” of aid in return for investigating Biden or unproven Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.
Mr Zelenskiy, however, said he only found out the aid had been held up before a meeting with vice president Mike Pence in Warsaw in September.
“I told him ... please help to resolve it," Zelenskiy said he asked Mr Pence. “And after our meeting America unblocked the aid.”
But another question is whether Mr Trump made a White House visit by Mr Zelenskiy, a top priority for the new administration in Kyiv, conditional on investigations that could benefit the US president politically.
Mr Zelenskiy admitted that he pushed for a meeting with Mr Trump in Poland or in Ukraine. He said he was concerned before the July phone call that relations between America and Ukraine had grown “tired” due to the large amount of money being spent.
“This call affected one thing. I understood that we needed to get a meeting, I want to show him our team,” he said. “I wanted to get him over to Ukraine.”
While Mr Biden pressured Ukraine's then-president to fire prosecutor general Viktor Shokin in 2016, the prosecutor had failed to move investigations of Burisma forward, a prosecutor's office employee told The Telegraph, and was embroiled in unrelated corruption scandals.
Mr Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, with whom he asked Mr Zelenskiy to cooperate, have also pushed bizarre allegations that Ukraine interfered in the US election by releasing documents that showed secret payments to Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
In the phone call, Mr Trump even cited a conspiracy theory that servers related to the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails were located in Ukraine.
