Ukraine Foreign Ministry to arrange Poroshenko UN visit, Trump meeting
23 January 2017
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry is working to arrange a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in the second half of February, the Ukrinform news service reported on Jan. 21, citing U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Valeriy Chaly. The ministry is also arranging for Poroshenko to visit the UN since Ukraine will take over the Security Council’s leadership.
U.S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20. In regards to Russia and Ukraine, he has vowed to improve relations with Russia in order to coordinate a military campaign to destroy the Islamic State. He has also vowed not to allow Russia to further invade militarily into Ukraine. At the same time, Trump said he’d be willing to relax sanctions as part of a deal. He said Crimeans would rather be with Russia.
Zenon Zawada: Ukraine is in Trump’s doghouse after key officials – including Chaly – worked on behalf of Hillary Clinton during her presidential campaign, according to an embarrassing report published by politico.com in mid-January. It was bad for Chaly to have assumed that Clinton would win, as the report alleged, prompting the Poroshenko administration to hire lobbyists to improve relations. This is in addition to lobbyists alleged by the administration to be lobbying Ukraine’s economic interests in Washington.
We see Trump’s main motivation in defending Ukraine is to uphold international law. He can’t allow Crimea’s annexation to be legally recognized and we are confident he won’t allow that. The other motivation is to protect his image as a strong presence on the global arena. In order to uphold that image, we are confident he won’t allow Putin any more military incursions into Ukraine.
Yet there is plenty of room for compromise with the Russians around these non-negotiables. We expect Trump to begin work on a compromise in the next several weeks, though it will likely be a long process with much opposition from the U.S. Congress, at least at first.
