The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

A big headline in Washington this week has been the qualification of the city’s major league baseball team for its first World Series appearance since 1933. The Nationals are the fourth franchise to represent America’s capital city in those 86 years, and their unexpected success has provided a much-needed diversion from the disillusioning yet compelling impeachment drama unfolding hardly more than a dozen blocks from the team’s home field.

In the US capitol building, Rudy Giuliani and Ukraine continue to be the lynchpins in the House impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump. Let’s take a look at Rudy and then at Ukraine.

Giuliani was a federal prosecutor in New York City and used that position, as have many before him and since, to advance their political ambitions. When the US suffered its most significant attack since Pearl Harbour and the twin towers of the World Trade centre burned and fell on 9/11, Rudy Giuliani was the city’s mayor.

He performed spectacularly well in the moment. As images proliferated of then-president George W. Bush looking dazed as he heard the news of Osama bin Laden’s brilliant attack, Rudy took charge. He was everywhere in the city, leading and rallying his constituents.

Giuliani was soon dubbed America’s Mayor. Bush, meanwhile, never really regained the full stature of his office.

As mayor, Giuliani is still credited by many New Yorkers with making the city’s streets almost amazingly safe. Though he had numerous detractors, Rudy was the right man for the time. He may have been New York’s most important mayor since Fiorello La Guardia, who left office in 1945 after three terms leading the city out of the Depression and through World War II.

Giuliani was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

He tried to ride his New York fame to the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, but his campaign faltered badly and, to some observers, humiliatingly.

His personal life had faltered several years earlier. While he was still basking in the glow of serving as America’s Mayor, Giuliani was moving on from his second wife, TV personality Donna Hanover, who said she learned her marriage was over while watching TV.

The third Mrs. Giuliani was already on the scene. The mayor’s affair with Judith Nathan was tabloid fodder until they married in 2003.

Nathan has told New York Magazine that her marriage started to fail when Rudy lost the 2008 presidential nomination fight to John McCain.

“It was an ongoing process that began when he lost the nomination,” Nathan said.

“For a variety of reasons that I know as a spouse and as a nurse, he has become a different man.” Nathan, trained as a nurse, may have been referring to Giuliani’s earlier struggles with prostate cancer.

Giuliani’s divorce from his third wife was public, and very bitter. “My husband’s denial of the affair with the married Mrs. Ryan is as false as his claim that we were separated when he took up with her,” Nathan told the New York Post. Hospital CEO Dr. Maria Rosa Ryan has been travelling with and attending White House dinners with Giuliani recently.

Nathan is reportedly receiving $42,000 each month in alimony from Giuliani.

No wonder that Rudy went looking for riches in Ukraine.

Everyone’s playing a game in Ukraine

Our history books tell us that one of the reasons Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany made the fateful decision to violate the terms of his infamous 1939 non-aggression pact with Soviet Russia was his desire to occupy and feast off an area then called the “breadbasket of Europe”.

That area included the abundant fields of what has been known since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union as the independent nation of Ukraine. For nearly 30 years, Ukraine has remained important for Western policy toward Russia and Eastern Europe generally.

It has been far more important than that for policymakers in Moscow, and especially for Russian President Vladimir Putin. For Putin and his allies, Ukraine is the line in the sand. The Russians are determined the West will not cross that line.

The reason lies in Russian history. For more than 200 years, the Tsars, the Communists and now the Russian plutocrats running things in Moscow have feared the West. Moscow’s rulers fretted about Napoleon; the rise of Germany; Britain; and more recently, the United States and its NATO alliance. Central to their concept of national security policy has been the maintenance of a buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe. In the years after World War II, Poland and East Germany constituted the main buffer between the USSR and the West.

After the USSR fell apart, the West added to NATO and the European Union the following: Poland, the three small newly-independent Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and most of the rest of Eastern Europe which had been aligned with and under the military thumb of the USSR for 45 years. Ukraine and loyal Russian ally Belarus have provided the buffer since 1991.

Although there have been many accounts of Western attempts to bring Ukraine into the NATO alliance and full membership in the European Union, for many reasons it hasn’t happened.

Many observers feel Moscow would do almost anything to prevent Ukraine from coming any further under Western influence.

Anything has so far included invading and annexing the Crimea peninsula and maintaining an active insurrection along the eastern Ukrainian border with Russia. Anything has also included leaning hard politically and economically on Ukraine to remain at least neutral between Russia and NATO nations to the west.

Putin has been especially active in this regard. This former KGB official has made no secret of his desire to return to the good old days prior to 1990 when the USSR was preeminent in the world with the United States.

It obviously vexes him that Russia is now regarded by many western observers as a mere secondary player on a world stage dominated by the US and China.

Three years ago, the Ukraine calculus changed. American voters elected Donald Trump and his curious fixation with and apparent admiration for Putin. Ukrainian politics have long been fetid and corrupt, fuelled by riches from still impressive agricultural output and transit fees for natural gas and oil from the east. Russia has had many reasons to keep Ukraine out of NATO and other engagements with the West.

Add to this mix American political fortune seekers like former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump’s current personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and, apparently, Joe Biden’s son Hunter. All saw a good opportunity to make a lot of money off the loose, fluid situation in Ukraine. As a result, Manafort is serving jail time now. Giuliani may someday face legal jeopardy too.

Hunter Biden has just announced his withdrawal from international boards in the wake of Trump’s embarrassing accusations about his activities in Ukraine.

That was the context for the Trump call to the president of Ukraine in July which finally triggered the Democratic effort to impeach the president. Trump seems to have seen a chance to enlist a morally uncertain foreign government to help him politically and at the same time help Putin keep Ukraine from straying too far from Russia’s orbit.

The witnesses now testifying before Congress apparently believe that such actions were contrary to the best national security interests of the US. Several GOP senators may agree.

It will be fascinating to see where it all leads, but from a historical perspective, it’s no great surprise that Ukraine is at the centre of it all.