Two pressures on Kyiv in early October 2019

What did Ukraine's leadership have to weigh in the first days of October 2019? On 3 October 2019, two separate pressures converged on President Volodymyr Zelensky: a widening political scandal in Washington that named Ukraine, and a step in the Donbas peace process taken two days earlier.

The Donbas track

On 1 October 2019, Ukraine agreed to the "Steinmeier formula". As reported at the time, it was aimed at granting special self-governing status to parts of the Donbas and organising elections validated by the OSCE and held according to Ukrainian law. Zelensky replied to a letter from Martin Sajdik, saying Ukraine was approving the text of the formula, which gives special status to what it called "separate territories" of Donbas.

The formula belonged to the Minsk process. That process began with talks in Minsk, Belarus, involving the Trilateral Contact Group of Ukraine, Russia and the OSCE, with France and Germany mediating through the Normandy Format. The first Minsk Protocol was signed in September 2014, in the aftermath of the fighting around Ilovaisk.

The Washington scandal

The second pressure came from the United States. The 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal centred on allegations that President Donald Trump sought to push Ukraine into investigating his political rival Joe Biden. It culminated in a phone call between Trump and Zelensky on 25 July 2019.

By early October the affair was moving fast. On 1 October, Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, hired Jon Sale, a prosecutor from the Watergate era, to represent him in the impeachment inquiry. On 2 October, Representative Adam Schiff's office said the whistleblower who complained about the call had sought guidance from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence before filing, while denying that the committee had seen the complaint in advance.

On 3 October 2019, The New York Times, citing sources, reported an allegation that two American diplomats had presented a statement for Zelensky to sign, in which Ukraine would commit to investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

What the days showed

The two stories ran side by side. One was a formal diplomatic commitment within an international framework, with Ukraine answering a letter from the OSCE's representative. The other was an American domestic dispute in which Ukraine's president was a central figure and Ukraine's own government was named in the allegations.

For Kyiv, the practical lesson of those days was that its foreign relations were being conducted on more than one front at once. Its Donbas decision on 1 October was a deliberate act of policy. The allegation reported on 3 October concerned a statement that diplomats were said to have asked its president to sign, and it placed Ukraine inside a political fight it had not started.