Ukrainian officials knew. They knew as far back as July that as much as $400 million in military aid had been put on hold, according to multiple sources, including a Ukrainian deputy foreign minister tasked with reviewing diplomatic cables from diplomats at posts across the globe. That's how former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine for the European Integration Olena Zerkal came across a communiqué in late July relaying that the security assistance was being withheld by the Trump administration, according to the New York Times.
“We had this information,” Zerkal told the Times in an interview. “It was definitely mentioned there were some issues.”
Donald Trump and his allies have made the dubious argument that President Volodymyr Zelensky couldn't have felt pressured to investigate the Bidens in his July 25 call with Trump because he didn't know U.S. military aid was on the line. It was a bogus defense from the start that has since been blown out of the water by mounting evidence to the contrary.
But Zerkal's recollection marks the first time a Ukrainian official has gone on the record publicly about a fact that the Zelensky administration tried to bury in order to sidestep the entanglements of U.S. domestic politics. According the Zerkal, the Ukrainian government even quashed her October trip to the U.S. to meet with members of Congress out of the fear that her discussions could sink Ukraine further into the U.S. impeachment imbroglio. “They said, ‘This is not the time for you to travel to D.C.,'" Zerkal said of Zelensky's aides. Congressional staffers confirmed that Zerkal had been scheduled to visit the U.S.
Zerkal's assertions also match up with testimony from a Department of Defense official that her Ukrainian counterparts began inquiring about the delay in military aid as early as July 25, hours after Trump and Zelensky spoke on the phone and Trump explicitly asked for "a favor."
The Zelensky administration's official line has been that he wasn't informed about the freeze until shortly before a Sept. 1 meeting with Vice President Mike Pence. Zerkal resigned from her position last week and apparently came forward with the information in part to reveal the Ukrainian government's "back channel diplomacy with both the Trump administration last summer and Russia this fall," as the Times put it.
The main purpose of Zerkal's cancelled trip to the U.S. had been to talk about sanctions on Russia with congressional members of both parties.