Ukraine's 1,000-hryvnia banknote enters circulation
A retrospective on the National Bank of Ukraine's new high-denomination note, issued on a day when Kyiv also featured in Washington testimony.
What did a new 1,000-hryvnia banknote mean for Ukraine's money? On 25 October 2019, the National Bank of Ukraine put a note of that denomination into circulation.
The issue was the bank's own step as the country's central bank, and it added a banknote with a face value of 1,000 hryvnias to the notes in use.
Kyiv in the news that week
The banknote's release came three days after separate testimony in Washington that placed Ukraine in the international headlines. On 22 October 2019, William B. Taylor Jr., the acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, testified before Congress as part of the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump. He said he had been told that President Trump would withhold military aid to Ukraine until the country publicly declared that investigations would be launched. These concerned Burisma Holdings, a company that had hired Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden, and Ukraine's alleged involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
That episode formed part of what became known as the 2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal, which grew out of efforts to press Ukraine to investigate Trump's political rival. Those efforts included a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on 25 July 2019.
The two stories were unrelated. One concerned the national currency and the work of the central bank; the other concerned US politics and Ukraine's place in it.
