U.S. Ambassador Kurt Volker knew the stakes were high in the weeks following political newcomer Volodymyr Zelensky’s victory in the Ukrainian presidential elections.
“The future of Ukraine over the next five years is going to be determined in the next three months,” Volker, then the State Department’s top diplomat for the war in Ukraine, told the Washington Examiner in early June.
Those words could prove prophetic. Six weeks later, on July 25, a conversation between President Trump and Zelensky about an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden lit the fuse on impeachment.
Volker had been referring to the importance of impending parliamentary elections and Zelensky’s overall success in assembling a government and implementing an aggressive anti-corruption agenda. “The administration recognizes that and is willing to try to lean in to provide support to Zelensky in advancing the reform agenda that he promised,” Volker said in the June 2 interview.
The three months elapsed. A whistleblower complaint raised the curtain on how that U.S. support became entangled with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s effort to dig up dirt on Biden and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Volker resigned his part-time position at the State Department on Sept. 27, after Giuliani implicated him in the scandal.
“Kurt is a great man who did his job,” retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, a former commander of U.S. European Command, told the Washington Examiner. “Sadly, politics have now cheapened it.”
His tenure ended after Giuliani published text messages showing Volker putting him in contact with Zelensky’s team. The ex-mayor has cited these text messages as evidence that he was acting on the State Department’s orders in pushing for Zelensky to open a corruption case against Biden and look for evidence that Ukrainian officials coordinated with the Clinton team to embarrass Trump.
Volker believed that Giuliani was poisoning Trump’s view of Ukraine based on evidence provided by a disreputable Ukrainian prosecutor, according to his prepared testimony to House investigators. He denied knowing that Giuliani wanted Zelensky to investigate Biden, as opposed merely to looking back at the 2016 election, although he provided additional text messages that show he was aware Giuliani wanted to jump-start an investigation into a company that hired Biden’s son.
Volker was trying to strike a balance between Trump’s interest in the prosecutions and the need for the United States to support Zelensky through weapons sales and diplomacy, such as a hoped-for meeting at the White House, according to diplomats and analysts who read the published text messages.
“He’s an honest man,” a Central European diplomat who worked with Volker, discussing the controversy on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner. “He wanted the best for Ukraine. He understood these hard choices, and he wanted to accommodate so that both sides would not go into the confrontation. So really my impression was that he was trying to get the best out of the situation.”
Volker, 54, was tapped by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as the lead U.S. negotiator for the Ukraine crisis in July 2017. It was a return to his roots as an aide to Richard Holbrooke when the latter brokered the 1995 Dayton Accords to end the Bosnian War. But Volker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO in 2008 and 2009, brought deep experience to the position due to his years of work as a middle manager of U.S. foreign policy in Europe through two expansions of the transatlantic alliance.
“I had the privilege of working on all of those enlargements, and I think for any of us who did so, we look at that as the most important things we have done in our lives so far,” Volker said in March, on the sidelines of the NATO Summit in Washington. “That this has made a difference in the lives of over 100 million people who now live in free prosperous and safe societies, when that was not the case before.”
That made him a relative rarity among Trump appointees. Scores of conservative foreign policy experts were blacklisted by the administration for signing an open letter denouncing Trump during the 2016 campaign. But that also made him valuable under a president who has rattled European allies with his pugnacious criticisms of NATO and occasional doubts about whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is responsible for the war in Ukraine.
“He didn’t sign the Never Trump letter, so he could be trusted by the Trump administration and he was trusted by the Ukrainians, and he was, again, super knowledgeable about the situation,” Evelyn Farkas, a friend who worked as deputy assistant secretary of defense for three years under Barack Obama, told the Washington Examiner. “It was helpful vis a vis the Europeans, for the Ukrainians, to show that the U.S. is committed — we haven’t changed our policy — even though our president says seemingly contradictory or unhelpful things on the issue of Russia or Ukraine.”
His appointment stirred some misgivings at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, where Volker had worked as executive director since its founding in 2012. Some board members “worried it would be a distraction,” but Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain believed he would bring “the right experience and judgment needed” to stymie Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Volker was a hit with allies and trouble for Russia. “He was very transparent,” the Central European diplomat said, recalling how Volker would talk to reporters after private meetings with Russian officials. “With open talks, he kind of laid down very clearly to be seen that Russia has been an aggressor and very unconstructive partner that really doesn’t have an interest to solve Ukraine’s war.”
That reputation took a blow from the recent revelations that he worked with Zelensky’s team to draft an artful statement calling for anti-corruption investigations in Ukraine. Volker hoped the statement would convince Trump to agree to host Zelensky at the White House, text messages with other diplomats show, in a high-profile show of unity against Russia. The draft was shelved when Zelensky balked at references to Burisma, the company that hired then-Vice President Biden’s son Hunter in 2014, and to the 2016 elections. His role in the drafting of that statement crossed a line, friends and associates acknowledge.
“I think Kurt’s motives were entirely pure in all this, which is he wanted to do what he can to help support and strengthen the Ukraine government and bolster it in its efforts to defend itself against Russia,” a Republican foreign policy expert who worked in George W. Bush’s administration told the Washington Examiner. “But then even with those pure motives, I can see how he might have rationalized being willing to pressure Zelensky to accede to Trump’s self-dealing.”
Volker stepped down as executive director of the McCain Institute on Oct. 7, just days after House lawmakers released the additional text messages, explaining that the controversy risks “becoming a distraction” from the McCain Institute’s work. Michael Polt, a former ambassador to Estonia, credited him with doing his job “as brilliantly and as well as could possibly be done” in light of Trump’s decision to empower Giuliani as an unofficial envoy with a political agenda.
“He sought to complete that mission in the best way he saw fit, in a very complex environment, both internationally and domestically,” Polt told the Washington Examiner. “He achieved a lot, in that context, and found himself, in the end result, in a situation that was beyond his control.”
Volker, of course, had long known that he faced uncertain prospects in trying to foster a partnership between the Trump administration and the Zelensky team, while advising the new leader in Kyiv on how to overcome the oligarchs and power brokers who have dominated Ukrainian society since the fall of the Soviet Union.
“Whether it works or not, we will see,” Volker told the Washington Examiner in June. “But now is the time to try.”
Joel Gehrke is a foreign affairs reporter for the Washington Examiner.
