Ukrainian and American officials in Kyiv told BuzzFeed News they had no advance warning of Giuliani’s arrival and only learned about it from media reports.
KYIV — Rudy Giuliani has made a surprise visit to Kyiv — but the city isn’t buzzing with his arrival. It’s groaning.
Giuliani arriving with his shady band of conspiracy theorists — just as Democrats move to officially file impeachment charges against President Donald Trump — is the last thing Ukrainians who have tried desperately to stay out of the drama unfolding in Washington wanted. Kyiv is trying to focus on upcoming peace talks with Russia to end the war simmering in its east, but Giuliani’s visit meant the headlines were all about impeachment once more.
Officials from the office of President Volodymyr Zelensky to the US embassy to everyone in between know that the arrival of the bombastic mayor is nothing but trouble.
“Holy shit. I don’t believe in such coincidences,” Ukrainian anti-corruption activist Daria Kaleniuk wrote of Giuliani’s arrival on Facebook, noting that it comes just days ahead of long-anticipated peace talks between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Paris on Monday.
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An official in Zelensky’s office said the president was caught off guard by Giuliani’s arrival, learning about it from the media. The official emphasized that there are “no official meetings” planned with him. Zelensky refused to meet with Giuliani in May, causing him to back out of his last planned trip to Kyiv. This is Giuliani’s first trip since his backchannel Ukraine campaign put the country on the map for many Americans.
Equally shocked by his arrival was the US Embassy, according to a US diplomat who said there would very likely not be a meeting between Giuliani and Bill Taylor, the current top US diplomat in Kyiv who replaced the former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and has provided key testimony in the impeachment inquiry, or anyone else at the embassy, for that matter. Giuliani arrived in Kyiv at the same time that Philip Reeker, an acting assistant State Department secretary who testified in closed-door hearings for the impeachment inquiry. Reeker was meeting with current Ukrainian officials as part of the State Department’s official channel “to discuss Ukraine’s impressive progress on reforms, including of the Prosecutor General’s Office,” the embassy tweeted.
Giuliani’s Eastern European trip is only just beginning, but in typical Giuliani style, it has already been surreal.
He began in Budapest, where he met Tuesday with Yuriy Lutsenko, a discredited former Ukrainian prosecutor general who has emerged as a key figure in the impeachment inquiry. Giuliani is filming the three-part program, Ukrainian Witnesses Destroy Schiff’s Case for OAN, hosted by Chanel Rion, inside a series of “undisclosed safe houses” for no discernible reason.
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Among those traveling with Giuliani is Andriy Telizhenko, a cigar-loving ex-diplo who's become Trump world’s own "whistleblower." He claims "Soros people" at the US Embassy in Kyiv are trying to block his return to DC to keep him from becoming ambassador. https://t.co/nGVVt5vwcT
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) December 5, 2019
Rudy explicitly says he’s in Ukraine on behalf of Trump: “I would hope they have more important things to do than intrude on the work being done by a lawyer defending his client,” Giuliani told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.” https://t.co/X6et002RGb
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 6, 2019
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