Alexander Vindman - Here, Right Matters: An American Story

To Rachel, Sarah, and Eleanor

A t 9 a.m., Thursday, July 25, 2019, I was seated with a few other White House officials at the long table in one of the two Situation Rooms in the basement of the West Wing. The bigger room is famous from movies and TV shows, but this room is smaller, more typically businesslike: a long wooden table with ten chairs, maybe a dozen more chairs against wood-paneled walls, and a massive TV screen.

This morning the screen was off. We were all focused intently on the triangular conference call speaker in the middle of the table. President Trumps communications team was placing a call to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, and we were here to listen.

Id been in this room many times, but you dont stop getting a kick out of it. Presidents sit at the head of this table; it was the room where President Obama and his team watched the Osama bin Laden raid being carried out. But as the call was placed, my usual excitement was subdued by a sense that something important had to happen in the next few minutes. While I was hoping that the presidents call to President Zelensky would bring to fruition many months of effort to get our national security policy back on track, I was also apprehensive that the conversation would turn into a train wreck.

I was a forty-four-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant colonel assigned to a position equivalent to that of a two-star general, three levels above my rank. Since July 2018, Id been at the National Security Council, serving as the director for eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Russia. Recently, deep concerns had been growing throughout the whole U.S. foreign policy community regarding two of the key countries I was responsible for: Russia and Ukraine. Wed long been confused by the presidents policy of accommodation and appeasement of Russia, the United States most pressing major adversary. But now there were new, rapidly emerging worries. This time the issue was the presidents inexplicable hostility toward an important U.S. partner critical to our Russia strategy: Ukraine.

Sharing a border with Russias southwestern boundary, on the flank of the European Union and NATO, Ukraine has been a scene of tension and violence since at least the Middle Ages. Most recently, in 2014, Russias president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, seizing the Crimean Peninsula, home to millions and representing nearly 5 percent of Ukraines territory, and attacking its industrial heartland, the Donbass, cleaving even more territory and millions of Ukrainians away from the capital, Kyiv. By 2019, little had changed, Russias annexation and incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation persisted, and Russian military and security forces and their proxy separatists continued to occupy the Donbass. The countrys security still precarious, the biggest change was to Ukraines importance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in eastern Europe. The region could not be more sensitive, volatile, or crucial to U.S. and NATO interests. Ukrainian leaders had recently assured National Security Advisor John Bolton that they were content to play the role of a buffer against Russian aggression; geography left them little choice. But they did requestactually, they insistedthat if Ukrainian blood were to be spilled to defend both the countrys independence and the freedom and prosperity of Europe, the least the West could do was support their efforts.

And yet, only weeks earlier, the White House had abruptly put a hold on nearly four hundred million dollars in U.S. security aid that Congress had earmarked for Ukraine. This was money Ukraine badly needed to fend off the continuous threat of Russian aggression on its territory. The abrupt, unexplained White House hold was, therefore, baffling. Not only was it 180 degrees out from the stated policy the entire U.S. government supported, but it was also contrary to U.S. national security interests in the whole region. Wed already gotten used to the presidents inattention to any policy, let alone foreign policy, but this sudden White House interest in Ukraine was something new, and was deeply unsettling. We feared that on a whim, the president might send out a barely coherent tweet or make an offhand public remark or an impulsive decision that could throw carefully crafted policy into total disarrayofficial policy of the United States, and thus, in fact, the presidents own policy.

For its not as if President Trump ever made active changes in policy. Indeed, we had never been alerted by the West Wing to any shift in national direction. The official Ukraine policy was, in fact, a matter of broad consensus in the presidents professional diplomatic and military administrationso, what exactly, we wondered, was the president doing? How could we advise him to reverse course on this out-of-nowhere hold on crucial funding for Ukraine? If he didnt lift the hold, something could blow up at any time.

In recent weeks, therefore, the whole community of professional foreign policy staff across the U.S. government had been scrambling to sort out what was going on. Everybody, from NSA Bolton to my recently departed boss at the National Security Council, Dr. Fiona Hill, to memy role was to coordinate all diplomatic, informational, military, and economic policy for the region, across all government departments and agencieswas trying to understand these unsettling developments and to come up with ways of convincing the president of the critical U.S. national security interest in deterring Russian aggression and supporting Ukraines independence. I proposed and was the driving force behind this interagency security assistance reviewwhich was not, as claimed later by the Oval Office, a review justifying the hold on the funds, but a means of bringing the discussion out of the shadows and into normal foreign policy channels.

By the time I was at the table in the basement conference room on July 25, preparing to listen to the presidents call to President Zelensky, my workdays had become consumed by the Oval Office hold on funds. As this was my region, responsibility for organizing a rapid response fell to me. On July 18, Id managed to convene what we call a Sub-Policy Coordinating Committee, a get-together of senior policymakers for the whole community of interest on Ukraine, from every agency and department, to work up a recommendation for reversing the hold on the funds. By the twenty-first, that meeting had been upgraded to a Policy Coordination Committee, requiring even more administrative and intellectual effort, which convened again on the twenty-third. We even scheduled a higher-level Deputies Committee meeting for the day after the Zelensky call. Chaired by the deputy national security advisor, these meetings bring together all of the presidents cabinet deputies and require an enormous amount of advance reading, writing, and coordination.

Due to the confusion over the White Houses behavior toward Ukraine, many of us were operating on little sleep, working more than the usual NSC fourteen-hour days. Id barely seen my wife, Rachel, or my eight-year-old daughter, Eleanor, in weeks.

During that period, Id discerned a potentially dangerous wrinkle in the Ukraine situation. Actions by the presidents personal attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, suggested a hidden motive for the White Houses sudden interest in Ukraine. Operating far outside normal policy circles, Giuliani had been on a mysterious errand that also seemed to involve the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, and the White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney. Just a few weeks earlier, Id participated in a meeting at the White House at which Ambassador Sondland made a suggestion to some visiting top Ukrainian officials: if President Zelensky pursued certain investigations, he might be rewarded with a visit to the White House. These proposed investigations would be of former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter: Joe Biden had recently announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination to challenge Trump for the presidency in the 2020 election. Hunter Biden had previously been on the board of Burisma Holdings, a large Ukrainian natural gas producer.