Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch: ‘If Putin Gets Away With It Again, He’s Not Going to Stop’

Here’s an article in Politico that begins:

It’s been more than two years since then-President Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate in his first impeachment, a scandal that was set off by a phone call between Trump and the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, anxious about his country’s position in the crosshairs of an increasingly bellicose Vladimir Putin. We know how that call went: Zelenskyy wanted to buy more Javelin anti-tank missiles from the United States, and in exchange, Trump asked Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden’s son’s activities in the country. Now, the invasion of Ukraine has made clear why Zelenskyy spent the rest of the call appeasing Trump, even agreeing with Trump’s unwarranted attacks on Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

Now, Yovanovitch, whose firing was at the center of the first impeachment, might be the person with the most interesting insight into how we got from that moment to this one. “It was pretty clear to [Vladimir Putin] and pretty much everyone else that Trump didn’t really hold Ukraine in high regard,” she told me in an interview. “So I think if you’re President Putin, you’re getting much of what you need from a President Trump. When Trump lost the 2020 election, I think maybe Putin had to recalibrate and look for other means to achieve his goals.”

Yovanovitch is out with a new book, Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir, about her three-decade-long career as a foreign service officer. She says she began writing it when Covid-19 upended everyone’s routines in early 2020, but she probably couldn’t have guessed that two years later, her experience in Ukraine would be urgent and valuable for an entirely new reason. I called her to discuss the new book, what she saw during her time in Ukraine that has made her think of the current conflict differently and how the impeachment has affected her life. “I’ve had a long career and I’ve done a lot of things throughout my life, some of which I’m proud of,” she said, “and I will always be remembered as the person who was fired by Trump.”

I have no unique insights into Putin’s mind; it seems most probable that what Ms. Yovanovitch says here is correct. There is no reason to think that there is something special about Ukraine that doesn’t pertain to the rest of Eastern Europe.

But speaking of high-level people “getting away with” their crimes, what about Trump himself?  He’s still on a roll, holding rallies in which he instills rage into huge crowds of morons who believe that Biden stole to the 2020 election. He remains the top contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, and there is no indication that the long arm of the law has any intention of reaching out and grabbing him by the throat.