For the moment forget all about Trump’s demand for an investigation meant to hurt Joe Biden, or the demand that Ukraine locate Hillary Clinton’s email server, and Paul Manafort’s long history of laundering money or lobbying for Ukrainian oligarchs.
1) In 2016, Trump directly interfered in the Republican platform to remove language supporting arming Ukraine against Russia-supported “rebels.” As NPR reported, an aide to Trump asked that this language be softened to indicate only generic “assistance” for Ukraine. Though Trump would later deny this, his aide said that Trump had “long held a clear position on Ukraine.” And he went on to explain that position. "Trump said on the campaign trail that he didn't want World War III over Ukraine. And he wanted better relations with Russia. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that arming Ukraine isn't consistent with those two positions." Leaving Ukraine defenseless was not just part of Trump’s campaign, it was the only change his campaign asked for in the Republican platform.
2) Also in 2016, the much-hated-by-Trump dossier assembled by Christopher Steele contained another connection to Ukraine. As Business Insider reported, one of the claims in the dossier was that the reason for Trump’s “long held position” was that he agreed to “sideline” the issue of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the direct price for Russian hackers providing DNC emails to WikiLeaks. This Ukraine-WikiLeaks “quid pro quo” simply required that Trump stay quiet about Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbass. In return, Putin ordered the DNC emails be given to WikiLeaks.
3) In February of 2017, less than a month after Trump took office, Foreign Policy reported that “It didn’t take long for things in Ukraine to go south in the Trump era.” After years in which the West had stood solidly behind Ukraine, and in which that nation had managed to reorganize its forces and grow its economy, suddenly “fighting has again flared up in the east, after many months of relative quiet.” In addition to the renewed fighting, Ukraine had to deal with a new factor in Washington because Donald Trump’s “affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin bespeaks a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy toward understanding Russia’s perspective—and away from understanding Ukraine.”
4) In July of 2018, Trump met with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. Following that meeting, Putin gave an interview in which he claimed that Trump, “made a secret arrangement during their two-hour opening talk what would ‘help resolve the conflict’ in eastern Ukraine.” The gist of that arrangement was that Russia would keep Crimea, along with any other area of Ukraine where people with a Russian heritage were in the majority.
5) On May 23, 2019, the Pentagon cleared the military assistance for Ukraine approved by Congress, saying that Ukraine had done a good job in addressing corruption and hitting benchmarks for upholding democracy. However, the assistance did not come. Instead, as The Washington Post reports, Trump spoke with Putin just days before the assistance was cleared. After this conversation, Trump was reportedly “sour” on Ukraine and placed a hold on the military assistance as soon as it cleared the Pentagon.
6) On September 25, 2019, Zelensky visited Trump at the U.N., where Trump urged him to “get together with Vladimir Putin” because “I really believe that President Putin would like to do something.” A week later, the BBC reported that Ukrainian forces were withdrawing from the Donbass region and would—as in the “secret arrangement” made between Trump and Putin at Helsinki—Ukraine would allow pro-Russia areas to vote themselves out of the country.
Even without Biden or the 2016 election, and without all the issues surrounding Paul Manafort or the strange refusal to cooperate with Robert Mueller’s team … when you tie Trump to Ukraine, it still looks bad.