Then-Ambassador Kurt Volker predicted this summer the future of U.S.-Ukraine relations.
“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 lead diplomat for the war in Ukraine, told the Washington Examiner in early June. “The administration recognizes that and is willing to try to lean in to provide support to [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky in advancing a reform agenda that he promised,” Volker said. “Whether it works or not, we will see, but now is the time to try.”
The comments, expressed just weeks before the phone call in which President Trump urged Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani, open a window into Volker’s mind at the beginning of a summer that ended with his resignation from the State Department and the launch of a congressional impeachment inquiry against Trump.
Volker didn’t have a rose-colored view of Zelensky, who was elected on a mandate to fight corruption but has close ties to controversial oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who has been tied to a banking scandal. Volker hoped, though, that Zelensky would implement a quick-strike reform agenda to undermine the oligarchs who had “owned the vast majority of things that matter in Ukraine” since the fall of the Soviet Union, Volker said in June.
“If you want to fix corruption, fix the oligarchic system so that you re-introduce competition across the entire economy,” Volker told the Washington Examiner.
A former colleague saw what Volker wanted to do. “He was looking at ways to try to keep reform in Ukraine moving forward dealing with corruption,” said Jim Townsend, who worked alongside Volker as a career civil service officer focused on Europe and NATO.
The situation in Ukraine proved labyrinthine, as Volker noted this summer.
“Ukraine is a complicated system with a lot of powerful people who have a lot of influence in politics, and in the media, and in the judiciary,” Volker said in June. “And they will all be competing right now. And, this parliamentary election is something that everybody is going to focus on about how do they advance their interests.”
Volker’s prediction on timing proved accurate, with defining events unfolding three months after he spoke to the Washington Examiner.
