businessinsider | A top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised US President Joe Biden on Thursday.
"Grateful to [the US], our reliable partner," the aide, Andriy Yermak, wrote in a tweet. "The @POTUS does more for [Ukraine] than any of his predecessors."
Biden's predecessor, former President Donald Trump, was impeached in 2019 and charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The impeachment focused on Trump's efforts to strongarm Zelenskyy into launching political investigations into the Bidens by withholding nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine and dangling a White House meeting.
The hold on the security assistance was lifted after Politico reported on Trump's actions and House Democrats launched an investigation into the matter.
At the center of the impeachment was a July 2019 phone call between Trump and Zelenskyy, in which Trump pressured the Ukrainian president to open investigations into purported corruption by Biden and his son, Hunter, ahead of the 2020 US election.
Trump also asked Zelenskyy to investigate the nonsense conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, and that Ukraine is in possession of a secret Democratic email server.
Yermak, as a senior advisor to Zelenskyy, was privy to Trump's and his aides' efforts to force Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.
Trump, for his part, has insisted that Russia's invasion of Ukraine would not have happened if he was still in office.
"If I were in Office, this deadly Ukraine situation would never have happened!" he said in a statement last month.
But days earlier, he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin's justification to launch the war as "genius" and "savvy."
His comments stood in contrast to those of US officials, who warned that Putin's recognition of two Kremlin-backed separatist regions in Ukraine was part of an effort to create a false pretext and invade the country.
Trump was repeatedly criticized throughout his presidency for making public statements and policy decisions that benefited Russia and hurt Ukraine.
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