Deciphering Planet Ukraine will be key to understanding the next US presidential elections

Landing on Planet Ukraine can be a tricky business. If you’re going to avoid a hard and embarrassing thud, you need descent thrusters, several shock-absorber legs and probably a parachute on reserve.

Rudy Giuliani probably understands that now.

On Friday, it was reported that Donald Trump’s lawyer had decided to travel to Kiev for an extraordinary scouting mission. His apparent aim was to “put pressure” on local authorities to investigate an alleged anti-Trump conspiracy involving Joe Biden – a man who just happens to be Trump's most prominent rival in the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

On Saturday morning, following The Independent’s scoop that president-elect Volodymyr Zelensky was in fact disinclined to meet him and meddle in foreign politics, Giuliani dramatically abandoned Mission Ukraine.

Giuliani complained that he had been “set up” and would not walk into a den of “enemies” of his president.

From the beginning, Giuliani’s limited connection to Planet Ukraine appears to have been via Yuriy Lutsenko, the country’s top prosecutor. Lutsenko has a mixed reputation locally. But his recent activity has endeared him to the folks in Washington.

In March, Lutsenko announced Ukraine was opening investigations into whether Biden had tried to fire his predecessor as prosecutor general in order to shut down a probe into a company where his son was working.

It didn’t seem to matter – either to Lutsenko or to Giuliani – that the original probe was shut down long before the former prosecutor was forced out of office.

Prosecutor Lutsenko also said he was also looking into whether Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency had fed information to the Clinton campaign about illegal payments to Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Manafort was later convicted in US courts partly based on this data.

For all those whose antennae are regularly tuned to Planet Ukraine, Lutsenko’s moves had to be considered in the context of his ally, Petro Poroshenko, having been forced from office in a humiliating landslide election. Through that prism, his investigations could be seen as an attempt at self-preservation, rather than offering the glimpse of real scandal.

Still, this latter reading of Ukraine’s “Biden investigations” remains a widely reported one – and, most troublingly, it seems to offer a taste of things to come.

On Saturday, Mr Giuliani made it clear his aborted trip would not be the last foray Team Trump would make into Ukrainian politics. There would be “many more” revelations to come, he promised; most, no doubt, supported by interventions by his new friend, Lutsenko.

With the prospect of Ukrainian politics being used and abused in the heat of a US election campaign, the media has a responsibility to be on its toes to filter the facts from fiction.

Given the peculiar terrain of Planet Ukraine, we will need to ensure our exploration vehicles are up to the job.

Yours,

Oliver Carroll

Moscow correspondent