"Today Trump hates Zelensky with all his heart. And Zelensky knows it," says businessman Lev Parnas, who worked for Trump. This is also the likely reason why the former US president is reserved about supporting Ukraine.
The blocking of aid to Ukraine in the US Congress is mostly supported by the concrete heads around Donald Trump. And the media recall that Trump himself has an old score to settle with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, writes the German daily "Frankfurter Rundschau" (FR).
"Trump hates Ukraine"
This suspicion was recently voiced by a former close associate of the former American president. "Trump hates Ukraine," he told Politico magazine. Lev Parnas, American businessman, born in Odessa. Parnas once acted in Ukraine as an intermediary for Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and later distanced himself from the former president and his lawyer. As the "Associated Press" agency writes, as an associate of Giuliani at the time, he worked to "dig up political dirt on Joe Biden". Now Parnas thinks that according to Trump "and the people around him, Ukraine is the cause of all the problems". Because it was through Ukraine and Biden's son Hunter's work there that the Trump team hoped to hurt his opponent.
Before the appropriate committee in Congress, Parnas says that he has not found any evidence of corruption by the Biden family abroad. Ukraine has never had evidence that Biden or his son violated the laws of the country, former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yury Lutsenko said in an interview in 2019, quoted by Politico.
"Trump and Giuliani lied to the American people"
The media reports that at the bottom of everything is a telephone conversation between Trump and Zelensky. This very conversation was one of the catalysts for the first impeachment attempt against then-President Trump.
Republicans have also begun impeachment proceedings against Biden. Before the congressional committee dealing with it, Parnas admitted that he helped Giuliani spread the false allegations against Hunter Biden in the conservative media. "The American people were lied to by Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and various cohorts of people in government and media positions," Parnas said. "They created lies to serve their own interests, knowing it would undermine the strength of our nation.
"If Trump wins, things will go bad"
Trump's team claimed that Joe Biden, as US vice president, pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to help his son Hunter's job on the board of the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma.
There was also a video that supported these claims, but Zelensky took no action despite Trump's insistence. And with this, he probably turns the former president against himself forever. Later, the conversation between Trump and Zelensky became public - it was understood as part of the wiretapping that exposed former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort. This is how the quite legitimate suspicion is formed that Trump insisted that Ukraine intervene in the pre-election battle in the USA.
"Politico" quotes Parnas, who says the following: "Today, Trump hates Zelensky with all his heart. And Zelensky knows it."
The extensive article by "Politico" on the subject begins with another significant sentence: "Trump does not forget and does not forgive so easily." And Parnas summarizes: "If Trump loses, Ukraine will get all the money and weapons it needs. Russia will be finished. But if Trump wins, things will go bad."