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Ukraine’s New President Joins the Resistance

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had not even been sworn in yet when Donald Trump’s consigliere, Rudolph Giuliani, initiated an attempt to lure him into pursuing a spurious investigation into Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s son. Fortunately, even the inexperienced Zelensky knew it was a booby trap.

NEW YORK – Beset with its own very large problems, the last thing Ukraine needs is to be sucked, yet again, into US President Donald Trump’s scandals. Fortunately, for all his deficiencies, Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, seems to understand this.

Zelensky had not even been sworn in yet when Trump’s consigliere, former New York City mayor and mafia prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, announced plans to visit Kyiv. His goal was to lure Zelensky into pursuing a spurious investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who had served on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of Ukraine’s largest energy companies. With Biden now leading the pack of Democratic candidates seeking to oppose Trump in the 2020 presidential election, Zelensky was being offered a poisoned chalice.

Giuliani was trying to turn the tables on the Democrats, who, in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, received compromising material on Trump’s then-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, through the administration of Ukraine’s then-president, Petro Poroshenko. Exposing Manafort’s activities in Ukraine (where he worked as a consultant for Poroshenko’s Kremlin-backed predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych) turned out to be a major feature of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s recently concluded investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

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