- A top aide to Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised Biden in a tweet Thursday.
- Biden "does more" for
Ukraine "than any of his predecessors," Andriy Yermak wrote.
A top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised US President
"Grateful to [the US], our reliable partner," the aide, Andriy Yermak, wrote in a tweet. "The @POTUS does more for [Ukraine] than any of his predecessors."
—Andriy Yermak (@AndriyYermak) March 17, 2022
Biden's predecessor, former President Donald Trump, was impeached in 2019 and charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The impeachment focused on Trump's efforts to strongarm Zelenskyy into launching political investigations into the Bidens by withholding nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine and dangling a White House meeting.
The hold on the security assistance was lifted after Politico reported on Trump's actions and House Democrats launched an investigation into the matter.
At the center of the impeachment was a July 2019 phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy, in which Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to open investigations into purported corruption by Biden and his son, Hunter, ahead of the 2020 US election.
Trump also asked Zelenskyy to investigate the nonsense conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, and that Ukraine is in possession of a secret Democratic email server.
Yermak, as a senior advisor to Zelenskyy, was privy to Trump's and his aides' efforts to force Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.
Trump, for his part, has insisted that Russia's invasion of Ukraine would not have happened if he was still in office.
"If I were in Office, this deadly Ukraine situation would never have happened!" he said in a statement last month.
But days earlier, he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin's justification to launch the war as "genius" and "savvy."
His comments stood in contrast to those of US officials, who warned that Putin's recognition of two Kremlin-backed separatist regions in Ukraine was part of an effort to create a false pretext and invade the country.
Trump was repeatedly criticized throughout his presidency for making public statements and policy decisions that benefited Russia and hurt Ukraine.
In 2018, he shocked American allies by eschewing years of US foreign policy and telling G7 leaders that the territory of Crimea was part of Russia. His remarks were especially jarring to the leaders of other member states given that it was Russia's decision to annex Crimea in 2014 that led to its expulsion from the G8.
But Trump told reporters before that year's G7 summit that he believed Russia should be admitted back into the alliance, and he also reportedly wondered aloud at the summit why world leaders sided with Ukraine over Russia.
Trump also took Putin's side over the US intelligence community's during a bilateral summit with the Russian leader in 2018, saying he didn't "see any reason why" Russia would have interfered in the 2016 election.
"I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia," Trump said. "I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be."
The former president walked back his statement following harsh blowback from allies, saying he misspoke and that he meant to say he didn't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia that meddled in the election.
As the Russian offensive in Ukraine was beginning to unfold last month, he blamed the situation on the 2020 US election, which he called "rigged."
"Well, what went wrong was a rigged election and what went wrong is a candidate that shouldn't be there and a man that has no concept of what he's doing," Trump said on Fox