The current state of the impeachment / call transcript hot mess

As is the case with everything and anything these days, since nothing can appear on the national radar without being instantly imbued with an ideological charge, the hot takes are already zooming toward us like a meteor shower.

But there are some consideration-worthy aspects to what we really do know:

In May 2018, Dem Senators Menendez, Durbin and Leahy sent a letter to Yuri Lutsenko, general prosecutor for the Ukrainian government, that, in its mention of all that the US has done for Ukraine, is similar in tone to the approach Trump took with new Ukrainian president Zelensky in that phone call of July of this year, except with mirror-opposite intent. The Dem Senators wanted to know what was up with the Ukrainian government freezing four investigations related to the Mueller investigation happening at the time in the US.

Jim Geraghty at National Review makes this important point:

The conversation between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky did not occur in a vacuum.

Starting in February 2014, Russia backed separatist militant forces in eastern Ukraine, setting off an off-and-on civil war in that part of Ukraine. Around that time, Russian troops rolled into Crimea and the following month they declared it part of Russia. In July, Russian-backed forces shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, killing 298 innocent people. That same month, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the civilian-taken satellite images showing that Russia was firing shells across the border at Ukrainian military forces.

By August, two columns of Russian tanks had crossed the border into Ukraine. By October, independent analysts had determined that at least 30 Russian army units had moved into Ukrainian territory. By January 2015, several hundred civilians were killed in fighting between the Ukrainian military and heavily armed militia groups calling themselves “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia”; Ukraine’s government contended that this was all backed by the Russian army, and that same winter, separatists forces took over the Donetsk airport after months of bloody fighting. In 2018, Russian warships fired on and seized three Ukrainian vessels.

Just because you’re not hearing much in the U.S. media about fighting in eastern Ukraine doesn’t mean it stopped. Day in and day out, there are more attacks, more casualties, more convoys of Russian military hardware spotted. Roughly 13,000 people have been killed. Russia and Ukraine are at war, and while there are intermittent glimpses of good news such as prisoner exchanges, Russia would appear to have the better prospects in the long term. 

Geraghty goes on to point out that, in the phone call with Zelensky, Trump doesn't even mention Russia, just implicitly using its hegemonic threat against Ukraine as a bargaining chip in the deal to be struck, a deal mainly driven by Trump's self-interest.

And the whistleblower complaint has just been released. At first glance, it doesn't seem any more conclusive than the phone call transcript.

But that won't stop tribalists from making instant assessments.